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Due to technological evolutions and social demands, motor vehicles are requested to be enhanced in terms of occupant safety and comfort. As a result, many countries are reinforcing crash regulations and new car assessment programs. Automotive seats are essential parts for providing passenger safety and comfort and have become most important. Many automotive companies concentrate on optimization of the seat structure. This paper presents an overview of the recent evolution of the seat structures and gives a development procedure covering seat frame design, optimization and validation. Through the study, a competitive frame design is drawn as a case result and a design guideline and a standard development procedure is established

Both experimental and numerical simulations were attempted to investigate postural changes of sitting occupants such as seat back pressure distribution and lordotic curvatures of lumbar spine with the different configurations of lumbar support. Using the detailed anatomical digital human body models, a fairly good quantitative prediction on the increase and transfer of peak pressure to lumbar region and the lordotic curvature raise of the lumbar spine as the support prominences was obtained.

New human body models have been developed with recent anthropometry for riding comfort simulation. External geometry of the models was acquired from the three dimensional whole body laser scanning of recruited volunteers in a driving position. The selection criteria for volunteers with standard size and shape were derived from a statistical factor analysis of the SizeUSA database. As a practical application of the model in a design process, comfortable driving postures were constructed by using the Cascade Prediction Model (CPM) which takes into account both interior package layout and the driver's anthropometry.