| Show automobile of the future to consider comfort beauty style and appearance chicago september 10 the successful automobile designer of the future must go beyond his engineer ing handbooks and bg be up on such auch things as physiology psychology and neurology declared henry G weaver detroit director ot of the customer research staff ot of general motors corporation before the international automotive engineering congress ot of the society of 0 automotive engineers at dinner at the palmer house tonight research in the realms ot of the physical sciences must be supplemented with a more definite and systematic knowledge ot of the tastes and do de sires ot of the ultimate consumer declared mr wagner developing the point that the time has arrived when automobile manufacturers must find tand out more exactly what the customers actually want as opposed to bellid building cars that sales or engineering departments think the customers want in the early days ot of the industry the automobile was nothing more than aniece ot of machinery and all too frequently it was not a particularly satisfactory machine at that there were so many things and such obvious things that needed to be done that there would have been no point in going out ot of ones way hunt hunting ing opportunities for improvement back in those days the motor car was little more than a novelty and the public knew little about such things as carburetors tors spark plugs and differential gears during tile the past quarter ot of a century primarily as the result ot of the widespread improvement and use ot of the motor car itself america has become a nation of mechanically mind ed people a people who have been around and seen things a people who travel more in a year than our forefathers travelled in a lifetime so we might say that the diacri discriminating in demands aan fastidious tastes of the motorist have kept well abreast of 0 the Indu offerings ot and the approach to mechanical perfection as reflected in the motor car ot of today has served to bring into focus the fact that the automobile Is far more than just a piece of machinery in contrast to most mec mechanical anical products or at least to a greater degree than other mechanical products tue tile modern motor car Is what w we is might call a social instrument as well as a transportation machine thus the instinctive human desire to move about more rapidly and more conveniently Is complicated by the social desire for style appearance comfort appointments and other factors which beyond a certain point do not lend themselves to laboratory analysis 1 according as the man lg is so 80 in must you humor him terrance said this two hundred years before christ and it is even truer today than it was then we are entering an era when tact fact fl riding finding will be more important than ever before tact fact finding not only in its application to physical arts crafts and sciences but tact fact find finding ing as applied to the tastes and desires of 0 the ultimate consumer |
