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Ford develops the perfect woman


After decades of focus groups and voiced opinions on what makes for high quality vehicle interiors Ford have come to a conclusion – humans don’t know.

We don’t understand how to measure quality and we’re too indecisive to ever be truly satisfied. So in true twenty-first century style Ford have resorted to the only sensible option – create a robot to do it.

She’s called RUTH – Robotized Unit for Tactility and Haptics – and she may be the answer to all our interior quality woes. Developed in Europe but now residing in the US, she’s aiding Ford in ensuring the 2013 Fusion is the world’s most comfortable car.

But what’s the secret? And how does a robotic creation measure areas like softness, hardness and comfort? It comes down to mathematical evidence and RUTH’s uncanny number crunching abilities.

Consisting of one giant arm with six joints, RUTH is programmed poke and prod at a car’s interior. She’ll press buttons, turn knobs, push on seating and generally mimic the actions of us humans.

The data is then collated to provide Ford’s interior design teams information on the perfect quality and comfort levels. This skips the lengthy process of collecting customer feedback and provides a higher quality product, as Ford craftsmanship supervisor Eileen Franko explains, “We are going further for our customers by more accurately and quickly assessing our products’ performance,”

“RUTH simulates the motor skills of a real person, allowing us to get precise measurements that explain what the customer wants. Engineers can take the findings and implement them. As a result, when customers sit in an affordable car like Fusion, they’ll feel instantly like they’re in a high-end ride” says Franko.

While the main focus remains on customer satisfaction, Ford’s productivity levels are expected to increase dramatically claims Franko, “Before RUTH, many engineers had access only to hand-held measuring tools, and no means to test the interiors in a manner that resembled in-vehicle scenarios,” he explains.

“An engineer outside of our department might even have pushed a dictionary and a pop can into an armrest to measure its resistance and softness. But now engineers can contact us and we can put RUTH into a vehicle; within a few hours, we can give them tangible data.”

So have Ford really created the perfect woman? We think so. Gone are the days of cooking and cleaning importance. If RUTH can make our ride perfectly comfortable then we’re more than happy. Now Ford just need a RUTH.2 for their engine development and they’ve hit gold.