Jaguar Land Rover plan to get you to ‘Walk’ while you drive

Jaguar Land Rover has developed ‘morphable’ car seats which use a series of actuators to mimic walking while you’re driving to improve back health.

We’ve all driven cars which leave us with an aching back after even a short journey, and we’ve all driven cars with seats so good (Volvo in particular) we get out at the end of a long journey without feeling the need for an emergency chiropractor.

But however good you might feel after a long journey in a car with very good seats, sitting for any length of time is really not good for us and, according to Jaguar Land Rover, that means 1.4 billion of us worldwide are liable to find the muscles in our legs, hips and glutes shortening and causing back pain. Which doesn’t sound good.

To try and address this global problem, JLR’s boffins have set to work to create new seats which address the problem of sitting behind the wheel for hours on end.

The result is a shape-shifting system using a series of actuators in the seat foam which make micro adjustments when your’re sitting – tailored to each individual driver – which make your brain think you’re walking.

Dr Steve Iley, JLR Chief Medical Officer, said:

The wellbeing of our customers and employees is at the heart of all our technological research projects. We are using our engineering expertise to develop the seat of the future using innovative technologies not seen before in the automotive industry to help tackle an issue that affects people across the globe.

Will these new morphable seats see it in to production? We’d like to think so.