Author
My Guidelines to working on your car:
1. No area pedal locations. Put pedal locations immediately on the device which needs them, and make them fairly flexible. One brake pedal belongs on each wheel. The gas pedal belongs directly on the throttle body. I get the impression that a number of the car manufacturers don't actually understand how to make a car.
2. Be aggressive. Make a whole new combustion system and rip out the existing engine. Eliminate constraints (within reason). When your car performs poorly, don't just replace the air filter and do a tune up. ... break the car apart and reassemble. Reposition the engine components, and everything else that might be worth expanding, to the TRUNK of the CAR. This will give you all the space you need. Leave the space where that engine used to be empty, if feasible; elsewise you'll have to move the radiator which follows the pipes down to the engine's original location, and put the coolant reservoir in after it. This will also entail a lot of tube and bolt reassignments, so before you even start making an oil change, document the rest of the car first. (it shouldn't be that hard, and if it is, the new generation of tools will help).
3. Make the cabin design easy to use. If that means ripping out the dash and seats and starting over, so be it. What this means in practice is, if you only have 32 distinct buttons locations across an entire console, *cough*Honda Civic*cough*, that's unacceptable. You should have as many button locations as you care to put in. They should be on the floor, in the door, and under the seat, not knobs on a stereo, nor items on some crazy dash cluster floating above the steering wheel. Granted the designers did do it that way, but I've got a feeling that the cabin was designed AFTER the frame was designed. It's unreasonable to expect users to cope with a system that was defined for a very specific scenario. Secondly, compression: don't use it. There's no point, and it gives the car owner one more obstacle to the realization of their vision. I'm sure your cylinders will still fire without it. Give the user the ability to determine the size of their pistons, and leave the limited space issues to their discretion. Offer them the support they need under the trunk: if the engine is bigger than the trunk will allow, or if its addition will bump the seats forward or out the doors around them, give them a warning and the option of resizing their frame. When they move one bolt, revise all the bolts for all of the car parts. This is why documentation is important. If you don't have the documentation necessary to do the revision, then you probably should wait till you do to finish the car.
By following these guidelines, you should be able to make user-friendly cars for drivers. Happy driving.
P.S. Potentially disrespectful satire. I gave in to temptation and failed to lead by example. I wouldn't be opposed to reporting of this post and receiving a warning. Shameful. I will try harder next time.
