Advances in automotive design are coming so rapidly that it's easy to forget when most cars had no air-conditioning and if you needed to adjust the window, you actually rolled it up or down yourself.

Today's virtual technology offers better understanding of driver issues and innovations both for the vehicles themselves and for the automotive engineers who design them. And while everything from homes to cars to highways are being designed with an eye on the aging of America, Ford finds that its ergonomics approach is yielding benefits for motorists of all ages.

Wes Sherwood, Ford's quality communications manager, explains:

"We do extensive research to ensure the comfort of our vehicles. You want to know that a very tall person can fit in your vehicle; a very short person can fit and someone who may have physical limitations can fit comfortably too. That may be an older person or it may be someone with physical ailments. That is a broad goal we have to accommodate as many of our customers as possible. Looking at the extremes, if you're able to accommodate someone with more limitations than others, then you are certainly able to accommodate those with fewer limitations.

What we found over time is that by studying our older customers and drivers, we take their needs into consideration and they tend to be a frontrunner of issues that our other drivers may experience.

The benefits that may be most obvious for older drivers also have benefits for other drivers. For instance, we used to use what's called a "Third Age" suit in our engineering development about a decade ago. That suit had different functions to restrict movement and other driving needs, visual restrictions, etc., so that a young engineer could experience some of the limitations that our older drivers might face. We have since moved to a much more digitally driven engineering process; we're developing vehicles in the virtua world and we are actually able to put our customers and design study participants into virtual vehicles before we even build a prototype vehicle to help us understand those needs early on.

We're able to take an older driver and with virtual techniques get an early understanding of what features may or may not work for them. With the Ford Flex crossover vehicle that's been on the street for a couple of years, we have a 'rocker panel' outside of the doors and that is what people use to get up into their vehicles. We lowered that because we saw in the design studies that older drivers in particular were having difficulty getting into the vehicle and we found that when you lower it that has benefits for everyone.

More recently we announced that this fall we are going to be rolling out vehicles with bolder fonts on many of our interior controls so people have an easier time seeing them and using them. That came out of a study of a wide range of people with an emphasis on older drivers showing they could benefit from having these bolder fonts on our controls. What was real interesting is that older drivers tend to give you a glimpse into issues that other drivers are facing but just aren't as pronounced. We found that younger drivers had similar issues just at a lower rate. We then project that over time the benefits would come to all who use the vehicle.

The benefits of the virtual environment are not just for developing the vehicle, we also do it for building our plants. We study the jobs of our plant workers and make sure they're as safe and ergonomically appropriate as possible and that reduces injuries. Before we build a plant we can put a virtual worker into a virtual plant to see if it will work!

Our perspective on automotive design is that it's a process and approach that we use for all vehicles. It's not about one specific feature or vehicle. We have a broad base of customers and when you have something that benefits an older person it benefits younger people as well."

Sherwood said Ford is currently developing vehicle innovations that monitor driver health and wellness and we'll take a closer look at them in a future discussion.