ONELIFE #33 – American English

ALL-NEW DISCOVERY
OBJECT 05:
CAD DOG
Since it first appeared in 1989, the Discovery has won a
reputation for extraordinary versatility, which allows it to be
both an expedition vehicle and a family car. But it doesn’t
just happen. It starts with Land Rover engineers meticulously
brain-storming every use you’re likely to put the car to,
and every object you’re likely to want to carry. And then it
involves going home to measure the dog.
“I remember the meeting vividly,” says Justin Cole, the
Senior Engineer who now heads the Land Rover packaging
department. “A few years ago, when we were working
on an earlier version of the Discovery, we created a list of
everything customers might want to put in the car. If someone
at the meeting had one of the objects – a surfboard or a
mountain bike or fishing kit – they were sent home to measure
it in sufficient detail for us to create a Computer Aided Design
(CAD) model, which we could insert into a virtual car to check
that it fitted from the earliest design stages.”
Justin had a 66-pound Labrador called Sam. “We knew that
Discovery owners were likely to have a large dog, and that
the Labrador was a popular breed. So when I got home I took
a tape measure to Sam. He was already at an age where he
was happy to sit still. We used the data to create two virtual
models of him, sitting and standing, and he’s been in the
back of every Land Rover since.”
Justin’s team carefully monitors our changing habits.
When the virtual Sam was first created, they were designing
storage for early cell phones, whereas the new Discovery can
stow multiple tablets in the central console alone. “But a big
dog is still a big dog,” says Justin. So although Sam passed
away a few years ago, he’s still used in the design process.
“His ashes are in a nice flower pot in front of our house
now, which flowers every year.” And he lives on in the back
of the new Discovery, having checked it’s just as comfortable
for dogs as it is for humans.
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