A car brake that makes sense—except to car companies
Have to love this front-page NY Times story “For Driving’s Start and Stop, One Pedal Could Do the Job,” about a Japanese designer/inventor who asked a classic stupid question about a car’s brake and gas pedals: “We have a natural tendency to stomp down when we panic. The automakers call it driver error. But what if their design’s all wrong?”
Masuyuki Naruse, a factory owner, found out what happens when you start asking questions. You get lots of pushback. Naruse, now 74, put forward a new, unified pedal design in 1991 after he experienced two episodes in the late 1980s of hitting the gas pedal instead of the brakes. He shopped it to Toyota back then, which tested and dismissed it. Perhaps if the car company had been open to Naruse’s stupid questions and design solutions, they might have saved themselves, and the people driving their cars, a lot of grief decades later. The question now is which car company today will be smart enough to acknowledge that maybe the old way doesn’t work, and that a redesigned pedal which takes into consideration the way human beings behave in stressful situations is simply good design.
Lots of good anecdotes & info in the Times article by Hiroko Tabuchi; read the full version here.
No related posts, but check around GlimmerSite for lots of other interesting articles.
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Sometimes I read articles on (good) design blogs and just scratch my head. That pedal design is horrible!
The sideways turning out of the foot is very unnatural. An average person's legs are not naturally that fine-grained in their movements, and there are a large number who could never adjust to such a change – people who are pigeon-toed or have less ankle mobility for a wide variety of reasons. And it overloads the control even further to bind these two actions in closer physical proximity. They are even joined to the same physical structure, giving a single point of failure. Innovation fail.
After considering this problem for all of 5 minutes I've come up with several sensible alternatives. Many valid options have been proven in other transportation categories.
Why not separate these controls further, physically, and split the actions between hands and feet. Motorcycles and lawn mowers have hand throttles that could easily be adapted to cars without affecting the form factor of the interior. There are many other proven solutions out there – for example, airplane controls – push the wheel to accelerate, pull to ease up on throttle, pull and stomp for a hard stop. Have a "safety clutch" like lawnmowers to keep from accelerating when you push or pull the wheel getting in and out of the car. There you go.
And there are higher order contexts from which this problem could be solved, if we (collectively) were open to higher order change. We could look at how cars (or roads, or traffic patterns) are engineered, and rebuild to optimize flow. We already have "smart car" technology that can detect road conditions, traffic, imminent impacts, deer preparing to cross the road… etc. And we have safer impact materials too. So another way to address this is to look at how we can regulate car movement outside the cockpit.
Or better yet, why not just design better public transportation, or remodel cities to support more natural human movement and interaction within communities? Use distance travel for recreation or collective trade, so that everyone isn't forced to drive (including my 80 year old mother)? We should be looking more long term, big picture, and simply pragmatic.
Sorry to be a wet blanket. I just think the "Design" community is entirely too self-congratulatory and silo'd in our ivory towers. Just because a design is novel and interesting academically doesn't mean it's not mediocre or, in fact, quite awful in everyday reality.
I like the idea of break…but that particular design looks really uncomfortable to me. I don't think I'd want to have to twist my foot to the side to keep my speed.