When choosing a car, I experienced various models one by one. Honestly speaking, due to the structure of the chassis battery, many pure electric models have high floors in their cabins. Firstly, the space inside the car will definitely be suppressed. Secondly, it is easy to cause situations like NIO ET5 that has a high car body but still has a small space. The second aspect is the seat. It’s not just about putting a small bench and stuffing some accessories inside to make a complete seat with ventilation, heating and massage functions and lumbar support adjustment. Some cars have high seat configurations, such as Nappa leather and seat ventilation, heating, massage and lumbar support adjustment, but sitting in them for a slightly longer time makes people feel very tired and suffer from waist pain and neck pain. Driving a car becomes very uncomfortable… Hence, I really hope that car companies can put more effort into the comfort of the seats.
FAW Besturn has always emphasized that its Bach seats conform to the ergonomic design of the human body, and are tailor-made for the physique of Chinese people. Therefore, I went to the Shanghai Glass Museum today to see what kind of answer FAW Besturn has put forward.
Because FAW Besturn has been vigorously promoting the cabin experience since the very beginning, and the seats are also of great importance, I have been hesitating to buy a car and waiting for this experience to make a decision. At the entrance of the Glass Museum, FAW Besturn directly compared itself with Mercedes-Benz S and NIO ET7, one being the leading company in the automobile industry, and the other being a strong model in the same level of electric cars. I was also very curious about how the experience of FAW Besturn F7 would be, so I followed the event flow to the stage of experiencing the seats through horizontal comparison. I will share my experience in the most intuitive way:
【Advantages of Laying Structure and Vertical Space】
As I mentioned earlier, one of the main reasons why the interior space of many electric cars is cramped is that the chassis is too thick. Especially for NIO’s battery-swapping structure, there has been no major upgrade since 2018, leading to a very thick battery pack and naturally a thick chassis. However, what’s interesting about the FlyFun F7 is that its chassis battery pack not only supports battery swapping, but also reduces the thickness by nearly 30mm after using the laying-type battery pack. This 30mm height gives more longitudinal adjustment space for the seat. So, even at a lower height than the NIO ET5, the F7 still has more space advantages. In summary, the F7 has a thin chassis and a larger interior space.
In my actual experience, the difference is quite obvious. I am 183 cm tall and when I got into the NIO ET7 and adjusted the seat to the lowest position, my sitting position was still relatively high. The thickness of the chassis took up a large part of the longitudinal space… On the other hand, the FlyFun F7 gives me a feeling of sitting in a gasoline car, making it hard to notice that there is actually a large battery pack under the chassis. The entire sitting position and field of vision are clearly better.
【Bach Seats: Hype or Reality?】
After solving the sitting position problem, let’s talk about the seat itself. Among all the cars I’ve driven, the seats of Lexus are the softest, which gives an excellent initial experience. However, soft seats do not provide enough support for the lumbar spine. Therefore, after sitting for a long time, there is a feeling of sagging, which causes the whole body’s pressure to concentrate on the lumbar spine, making long-distance driving very tiring. The seats of Volvo have high support for the back, but the overall skeleton is too hard, and it is not friendly for Chinese people who are thin and weak. The engineers of FlyFun mentioned that they have analyzed the body shape data of Chinese people. The seat of the F7 is filled with three layers of foam padding with a total thickness of 65mm, and the 580mm front seat cushion provides better support for the root of the thigh. If I remember correctly, this value is also the highest in the same class. There was also a pressure analysis of the seat force at the scene, which was too professional for me to understand. So let me tell you about the experience directly:
After I adjusted my driving posture, I could clearly feel the strong support on my back with sufficient soft padding but without sagging. Many car enthusiasts may have noticed that there is a certain gap between the waist and the seat back in normal sitting posture, so I think many people will also purchase seat lumbar support. However, with the optimized design of the backrest curve of the Bache seats in F7, this will not be necessary, and the triangle support point will be formed at the junction of the large and small thighs after the driver’s legs are extended, so that the knee joint will not have a suspended feeling. Since F7 is positioned as a mid-to-large-sized car, the rear seats are also treated equally, and the 496mm seat cushion length is mainly for comfort. Therefore, from my half-hour continuous seat experience, I think the vision of “not getting tired of sitting for a long time” may come true in F7.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.