Buses, Coaches and Commercial Vehicles
Overview
In collaboration with our clients, DCA’s multidisciplinary transport team has extensive experience of delivering real-world commercial vehicle, bus and coach solutions for a range of global markets.
These research-led projects are built on the insights gained from observing and interviewing passengers and other service stakeholders and developing best in class ergonomic and design solutions that respond to their identified requirements and wishes.
Meanwhile, our engineers ensure that the appropriate technology is incorporated where needed and that our solutions are feasible and take account of the relevant manufacturing requirements and constraints.
Creating the vision
New technologies are opening up new opportunities to radically reshape our transport infrastructure. New transport business models are simultaneously transforming mobility needs. DCA works with key stakeholders on every brief to visualise and develop outcomes that fit perfectly within the context of your unique requirements.
The A-Star shuttle bus that DCA developed with Xiamen Golden Dragon is just one such example. The idea for a zero-emissions and autonomous passenger shuttle was born from a collaborative design project between DCA and Golden Dragon. Having explored several ideas for future vehicles, the project focused on an electric, autonomous shuttle bus that would answer the demands raised by incoming environmental legislation and trends in urban planning and traffic management in China.
At the time of its launch, the A-Star was the first of its kind, offering a zero-emissions solution to reduce urban congestion and pollution by transporting people between transport hubs and car parks outside of high-density urban areas such as city centres, business parks and tourist sites.Today, the A-Star is in operation in many cities in China and beyond and has won several awards. Competitors have tried to replicate its success, but the A-Star remains the leading product in this market segment that it helped to create.
Exterior design
Commercial vehicles, buses and coaches will typically have extended service lives, so it is our responsibility to avoid short term fashions and trends in the design of such vehicle exteriors, focusing instead on timeless qualities and enduring design features.
At DCA, we utilise form, detail and applied livery to reinforce these abiding values and communicate your core brand messages, recognising that by their presence on the road, these vehicles act as the most obvious public representation of your service or company.
With a combination of digital sketching and 3D CAD surface modelling, we explore a wide range of exterior form options in depth at the beginning of the design process, seeking to create a distinctive visual personality for the vehicle. We work over representative structural and engineering underlays to ensure that our proposals are realistic and take account for manufacturing, assembly and servicing constraints, as well as industry legislation and operating regulations. However, despite the importance of these practical considerations, they are never prioritised to the exclusion of innovation when challenging the norm could offer valuable aesthetic benefits.
Livery design
Particularly for coaches and buses, it is essential that the exterior form and applied livery work together to deliver the appropriate company and service brand messaging. A successful livery must also be in harmony with the physical environment in which the vehicles operate and the cultural themes of the communities that they serve.
From a practical point of view the combination of colours, paints and vinyls must be carefully selected, tested and specified to ensure that they can withstand the prevailing climatic conditions without fading or deterioration. The vehicle livery must be easily maintained to a high standard, including the ability to apply quick fixes during a shift when necessary, so that it always presents the best possible image of your company and service to the public.
A successful livery must be in harmony with its physical environment and cultural themes
Driver environments and control layouts
In the majority of our bus and coach design projects, we seek to visually and physically separate the driver’s environment from the passenger space, allowing us to create an ergonomic, comfortable and safe working space.
This will often involve incorporating multi-functional touchscreens in conjunction with separate physical switches for key functions to deliver a less cluttered, more ergonomic driving experience with essential functions all being placed closer to the driver. When designing human interface and control strategies that incorporate mixed technologies such as this, creating an experience that feels intuitive to drivers, particularly those with established ways of working, is essential.
To address this issue, our in-house human factors and ergonomic experts can observe real-world driver behaviour during accompanied journeys, undertake in depth interviews and collaborative workshops, and carry out practical trials using reconfigurable physical rigs to develop optimal solutions jointly with driver representatives, gaining their confidence and buy-in.
Passenger ergonomics and journey experience
Ideally, we begin each project by observing and interviewing passengers, drivers, operators and maintenance staff on a range of representative journeys. These experiences, coupled with desk-based research into changing travel behaviours and passenger expectations, give us crucial insights and provide the foundations for our later design work.
Seat comfort is central to a great passenger experience on-board, so it is essential that effort is focused here. Our designers and human factors experts have supported vehicle manufacturers by analysing and testing a range of supplier seats to identify preferred options. We then worked closely with the selected seat supplier to incorporate our recommendations for geometry and form changes to improve the visual appearance of the selected seat and match best ergonomic practice.
Entering the vehicle sets the tone for any journey and should be a passenger orientated experience. By using differentiated colours, materials, lighting and finishes we can segregate the entrance way so that passengers don’t feel like they are encroaching on the driver’s working environment and personal space. The monuments that define the entrance on coaches in particular can be designed to welcome passengers with friendly, furniture-like forms and materials and should be shaped to guide passengers in and out of the vehicle without the feeling of passing through the driver’s space.
In a specific example of the power of research-led design, we identified that on many coaches the controls for the air vents and reading lights traditionally sit nearer the window making them hard to access for the passenger in the aisle seat. We redesigned the luggage racks so that these controls were located further towards the aisle so that the air vents and reading lights sat directly above each passenger.
Colour, material and finish (CMF)
Every coach or bus interior can be brought to life with imaginative combinations of coloured panels, fabric patterns, laminate materials and paint finishes. Combined with the right lighting, these CMF solutions create a welcoming environment that makes passengers feel comfortable and valued.
As well as providing great visual solutions, we also ensure durability of all our interior CMF choices by working closely with suppliers to specify hard-wearing materials that are easy to clean, service and maintain. Using robust materials on high impact areas helps to reduce damage, keeping the interior looking fresh longer.
Detailed engineering
With DCA’s multidisciplinary project teams incorporating engineers and designers from the outset, the collaboration required to apply new technology where this is appropriate while ensuring that our concepts are practical and realistic is naturally embedded in every project.
Our engineers like to spend time on site at your facilities at the start of a project, engaging with your production team and your key suppliers to understand the particular strengths of your manufacturing processes and supply chains as well as any constraints that we will need to accommodate in our design proposals. We then look to gain regular feedback from these same stakeholders at key points in the design process, helping to maintain the design intent into production and smoothing the transition from concept to volume manufacture.
In a recent project for Arrival, we undertook the design and installation of the mounting system and enclosures for a series of sensors and ancillary equipment to be fitted to the roof of a commercial van in support of their autonomous delivery vehicle programme. Key to the project was mounting and housing the sensors in ways that isolated them from general road vibrations and protected them from the elements, while providing easy access for set up and servicing.
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