Human factors engineering/ergonomics is one of the most important disciplines contributing to customer-oriented vehicle design. This discipline is of great interest to mechanical engineers, since safety and ease of use are critical product attributes. This paper identifies some of the vehicle attributes important to the customer and the associated human factors issues. As an illustration, this paper describes the information required to design a navigation interface. In addition to application-specific data, basic human factors research is needed to provide a foundation for vehicle engineering and evaluation, in particular, research on replicable protocols for measuring how people drive (both normally and prior to crashes).
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