{"id":10195,"date":"2020-01-06T09:09:29","date_gmt":"2020-01-05T23:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/?p=10195"},"modified":"2023-08-18T23:03:55","modified_gmt":"2023-08-18T13:03:55","slug":"designers-please-explain-this-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/automotive-design\/designers-please-explain-this-feature\/","title":{"rendered":"Designers, Please Explain This Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Over the Christmas and New Year holiday season, we went on a good old-fashioned road trip \u2013 well away from where all those horrible fires have been happening.  In keeping with old-fashioned road trips, we decided that this was a good time to give our 2000 Ford Falcon <\/a> AU a chance to show its paces. It\u2019s been my husband\u2019s doer-upper and mancave tinkering project for a while now, so why not? It certainly behaved itself nicely on the road and was comfy for long journeys.  However, it had one little design feature that puzzled me and certainly gave us something to talk about during the more tedious stretches of the road once we\u2019d exhausted the topic of how appalling the fires are, what caused them, the smoke haze, etc. etc.<\/p>\n

The feature in question in the boot.  The boot doesn\u2019t have one of those old-school buttons that unlatches the boot on the boot door itself. Instead, you have to unlock the body of the car and put the key in the ignition and turn it on one click then press a button on the dashboard \u2013 which is rather faded on this 20-year-old vehicle.  Slightly fiddly, yes, but no worse than what you have to do with my mother-in-law\u2019s Suzuki Kizashi <\/a> that uses an auto-unlock key fob.  The automatic key fob might seem like a brilliant idea when you\u2019re approaching the back of the Kizashi with your hands full \u2013 and my mother-in-law loves this feature \u2013 but it\u2019s a bit of a nuisance when you want to send one of the kids to go and get Gran her cardy out of the boot please, dear.  This means that the keys have to come out of wherever Gran\u2019s put them and it takes a less experienced person to hold the fob in exactly the right way before the boot\u2019s opened and Gran has to go and show the kiddies how to do it properly.<\/p>\n

Anyway, back to the boot of the Falcon.  Despite the need to have the keys in the ignition to open the boot from the outside, the boot itself has a mechanical boot hatch release lever.  On the inside of the boot.  In a sedan.  A sedan where you can\u2019t open the boot mechanically from the outside and where the body of the car has to be unlocked before you can open the boot. When on earth will you use this lever?<\/p>\n

The lever is no good in the all too common scenario of accidentally shutting your keys in the boot. In fact, if you unlocked the Falcon\u2019s boot, took the keys out of the ignition, locked the doors and then accidentally dropped the keys in the boot before slamming it shut, you would be in the poop, as you would have access to neither boot nor cabin.  So the mechanical lever was no good for that situation.<\/p>\n

If you couldn\u2019t get out of the car doors for some reason but you were inside the cabin of the sedan, you could possibly exit via the boot.  In the unlikely scenario that you opened the boot, took the keys out of the ignition again, then shut them in the boot, you could do the same. This would require you do fold the rear seats of the sedan flat and move the luggage out of the way first. Fortunately, the seats do fold flat, allowing access into the boot, although I haven\u2019t tried this myself. The load-through slot that appears when you fold down the arm rest and the cupholders is far too small for anybody over the age of three to squeeze through. You could, in theory, reach the mechanical lever by reaching through the load-through slot but only if (a) you had arms like an orangutan and (b) the suitcases and the picnic basket aren\u2019t in the way, as the boot release lever is nearer the front of the boot.<\/p>\n

The only time that you would be able to use that release lever is if you were riding inside the boot of this sedan and the hatch door was closed.  Again, when would this happen?  In the rather dangerous and illegal case where you\u2019ve got a sixth person needing to ride in the car and you\u2019re out of seatbelts, you could smuggle that person in the boot.  This is NOT RECOMMENDED (although I\u2019ll admit to having taken a passenger this way once over 20 years ago \u2013 and it wasn\u2019t in Australia, either).  However, even then, the passenger riding in the boot wouldn\u2019t want to open the hatch and get out while the car is moving.  He or she would have to push open the load-through slot and ask the driver to stop. Then the driver could also push the button to open the boot as well, so the lever wouldn\u2019t be used anyway.  However, if everybody else had left the car and someone was still inside the boot, they could let themselves out \u2013 and the only times we could see this happening was if someone was trying to stow away on a ferry or sneak into, say, a music festival or military base without the gatekeepers noticing.<\/p>\n

After much discussion, we figured that the only time you\u2019d really want to use the inside boot release lever is if you had been kidnapped and shoved in the boot, and you wanted to alert other road users to the fact so that you can be rescued \u2013 or so you can jump out of the boot.<\/p>\n

I am somewhat aghast that the designers built in a feature that is only useful in the case of being abducted or when doing something illegal.  Did they really think that cases of kidnapping are that common? Did they design a car that\u2019s useful for sneaking in unofficially or for people smuggling? WHAT WERE THEY THINKING????<\/p>\n

If anyone can throw any light on this feature, I would love to know. Please give us your best speculations in the comments!<\/p>\n

  http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/forex.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the Christmas and New Year holiday season, we went on a good old-fashioned road trip \u2013 well away from where all those horrible fires have been happening.  In keeping with old-fashioned road trips, we decided that this was a good time to give our 2000 Ford Falcon  AU a chance to show its paces. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-automotive-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10195"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14875,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10195\/revisions\/14875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}