Patent ID: 8606465

Claim:
A method for designing a vehicle to classify a vehicle driver for optimizing vehicle safety systems and devices for the driver, said method comprising: determining a number of basic driver sizes based on population distributions for each gender; determining a proper driver seat position for each basic driver size; identifying a set of tunable design variables that are used to adjust the vehicle safety systems and devices; performing design optimization analysis on the set of tunable design variables in a processor to identify a set of optimal designs for the vehicle safety systems and devices where each optimal design corresponds to a basic driver size; performing crash simulations on the processor for each optimal design from the set of optimal designs for a predetermined number of randomly selected reference drivers to produce crash simulation results; using the crash simulation results to identify the best optimal design from the set of optimal designs that provides the best performance for each of the randomly selected reference drivers; creating a predetermined number of driver classifications using the best optimal designs where each driver classification identifies a group of drivers that gets the best performance from a particular optimal design; and manufacturing a production vehicle so that the vehicle safety systems and devices are set to an optimal design for a particular vehicle driver based on the driver's size, where the driver's size includes height and mass using the driver classifications.