It strikes me as crazy that you can spend £400,000 on a car these days and still find the seats uncomfortable.
Today’s invention is to provide people with this kind of spending power with a seat containing a flexible membrane and a matrix of automatically controlled springs and dampers (each affecting an area of say 4cm^2). (You can buy anti-vibration pads, but these are way too crude to deal with long distance discomfort).
Such a system would add to the overall ride comfort over poor road surfaces, but would also provide support and softness dependent on the weight and pressure distribution of the rich person’s posterior (and back).
This could be made so that, on long journeys, the shape and pressure distribution could be subtly and automatically altered, so that passengers avoided any tendency to develop sore spots, blood clotting, numbness etc.
A control program could be included that allowed the seat to maintain a passenger’s eyes at a fixed height from the road, so that any car sickness could be lessened.
A driver’s version could be engineered to do much more than the currently available hugging bolsters. It might even give extra driving feedback about the condition of the road, steering and suspension, via the driver’s rear, during ‘spirited’ driving.
