Next-Gen Subaru Crosstrek Seats Have Your Back, With Help From A Medical Team

How comfortable are the new 2024 Subaru Crosstrek seats? Subaru went to a university's medical department to make them the best. Check out the report here.

It’s April Fool’s Day, but this is not a joke like the Subaru Forager Granola. The new redesigned 2024 Subaru Crosstrek gets more than a facelift; it brings new front seats developed with the help of a university medical department. At Gunma University, near Tokyo, Subaru started a joint course and enlisted the cooperation of a professor from the Faculty of Medicine, who gave them advice that if they could reduce the movement of the pelvis of the occupants, we could reduce body sway and improve ride comfort.

To further improve ride comfort in the new Crosstrek subcompact SUV, Subaru engineers borrowed the power of the university's medical department. They carried out development that went as far as the anatomy of the human body.

Because humans are equipped with advanced sensors in our bodies, they can sense differences in hair thickness of 0.05 to 0.1 mm with their fingertips. However, because of the body's abilities, it unconsciously receives information that is not necessarily good for driving, sometimes leading to fatigue and discomfort.

Subaru analyzed the causes of fatigue and discomfort while riding in detail and incorporated the medical knowledge learned from this information to develop the new Crosstrek seats. One of them is the seat structure. Subaru says that fatigue and motion sickness while driving is mainly caused by the head's shaking caused by the car's roll motion.

Subaru said, "This time, when we took an approach based on human body structure, we found that this vibration is transmitted from the waist to the lumbar vertebrae, neck, and head, using the seat as a spring. Therefore, we developed a seat that suppresses the shaking of the head by pressing the sacrum of the lumbar vertebrae."

Furthermore, the seat fixing structure has been changed from the conventional method using brackets to a system in which the seat rails are fixed directly to the vehicle body. The vibration of the seat itself can also be suppressed by being firmly attached to the vehicle's body side. As a result, Subaru reduced the head's shaking by about 40 percent compared to the conventional model, producing a comfortable ride.

Engineers put the medically-produced seats in a next-generation Crosstrek for further testing. The model equipped with the new seat was evaluated and provided less driver fatigue, especially during long-distance driving.

Subaru spent the time and money to hit a home run with the next-generation 2024 Crosstrek seats. As a result, you can drive further off the grid with the new subcompact SUV without getting fatigued.

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Denis Flierl has invested over 30 years in the automotive industry in a consulting role working with every major car brand. He is an accredited member of the Rocky Mountain Automotive Press. Check out Subaru Report, where he covers all of the Japanese automaker's models. More stories can be found on the Torque News Subaru page. Follow Denis on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Photo credit: Subaru