Why are car seats nowadays harder compared to the past?

2025-03-26 12:56:34

The significant difference between car seats and sofas is that car seats need to adapt to moving environments. Due to the frequent impacts from the body of a car seat, it cannot be designed to be too soft like a sofa, otherwise passengers may feel unstable and shaky while driving.

For example, the front connected seats introduced in the 1911 Chevrolet Classic Six, although adopting a sofa design concept, increased seating space and improved static comfort. However, soon people found that this type of seat lacked support during driving and could not meet the dynamic needs of the car.

For example, seats without anti slip bulges will cause the passenger's body to move forward relative to the seat during emergency braking. Fortunately, on highways in the United States, this issue is not very apparent.

However, this old-fashioned design is no longer applicable in modern times. When an object vibrates, it may cause resonance, posing great harm to buildings and human health. Although car seats will not break due to this, comfort will be greatly reduced, which may cause symptoms such as fatigue, dizziness, and even vomiting.

To describe this issue, we refer to the comfort of a car transmitting vibrations through the seat frame and cushion during motion as dynamic comfort. Research has shown that the human body is most sensitive to vibrations at frequencies of 4-8 Hz, and the key to solving this problem lies in the stiffness and damping coefficients. The stiffness determines the resonance frequency of the seat, while the damping coefficient determines the vibration attenuation characteristics of the seat. The relationship between the two is similar to the peak power and characteristic curve of an engine.