GM wants to make family vehicles more accessible
Though families have always been the largest users of minivans, the car companies generally design their brands for more general use, hoping to appeal to empty-nester couples and other demographics as well.
This tends to make the average minivan less useful for a family than it could be, since the seats are designed to fit everyone from a young child to her grandparents, and the interiors are generally suited to adult sensibilities. Creature comforts are added that make adults feel good about the minivan, rather than the children.
This all drives the price up, and that makes it harder for families to afford. Consider that when Toyota Canada launched the newest version of the Sienna last year that consumers had to pay more than $50,000 to get one with a DVD player, and that's about the only kid-friendly feature in the vehicle.
Well, there's a group of young researchers at General Motors that's working on a new perspective for the family-friendly minivan that could revolutionize the breed.
Under the direction of Kevin Kolpasky of GM's Design and Technology Fusion department, the company is showing off the Juno concept vehicle to the millions of visitors to the Innoventions display at Epcot Centre in Orlando, Florida.
''Juno demonstrates how a small, sporty vehicle can easily be equipped with family-friendly features that not only meet their needs,'' says Kolpasky, ''but also stay within their budget.''
With Juno, GM is honing in on a very particular user of the family vehicles -- people with families. As Kolpasky says, ''One thing that never goes away is that people will always have kids.''
From that insight, Kolpasky and his team quickly got to ''If you're just going to drive your kids, why not design it for kids?''
In the mind of Kolpasky, whose title is senior creative engineer, ''Adding convenience and entertainment to the family drive just naturally results in reduced driver distraction and results in a much safer ride.''
The parents may not appreciate all of Juno's features, says Kolpasky, but their children will. Such kid-centric features would include:
- specially designed step-assist and handles help young passengers get in and out of the vehicle;
- the seats are designed for the comfort of children and are ''placed for convenient interaction between both children and adult passengers''
- for infants, there are monitors located at the infant seat and also on the dashboard, where ''parents and baby can keep an eye on each other''
- controls for temperature and lighting are located right at the seats so children can control their own comfort, which will give the children a greater sense of controlling their own environment and could result in fewer distractions for the driver;
- the side windows can be dimmed for privacy or for naps.