Nissan Serena teardown (2): User-friendly features
Realizing creativity and ingenuity through simple construction
2017/04/21
- Summary
- Creative solutions for 2nd row seats
- Innovative single-piece rear-door hinge lightens basic structure
- Rear seat air conditioner designed for efficient cooling
- Capless fuel tank allows users to refuel without getting their hands dirty
- Foot-operated hands-free automatic sliding door
Summary
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| The rear door, whose top half can be opened |
Continuing from the previous installment (Nissan Serena teardown (1): ProPILOT autonomous driving technology), this report will cover a teardown analysis of the 5th-generation Nissan Serena (model C27: released in 2016), conducted in January 2017 as part of the benchmarking activities of the Hiroshima Industrial Promotion Organization.
This report will cover various convenient and user-friendly features of the Nissan Serena, which were carefully planned out by the designers in consideration of actual minivan users.
The 2nd row of seats is easy to use and capable of multiple seating configurations. B Sliding the middle seat all the way to the front transforms a space for 3 passengers into one where 2 have ample room. The left seat not only moves forward and backward, but can also slide horizontally, and be configured to a more appropriate layout for different uses. For example, even if drivers place a child seat in the 2nd row and thereby make it so the seat cannot be folded, there will still be enough room so that passengers can enter the vehicle through the sliding door to sit in the 3rd row seats.
The rear door is a half-door, allowing drivers to open the top half when parked in tight parking spaces that would normally prevent full-sized rear doors from opening.
The piping for the rear seat air conditioning is constructed in a manner where low-pressure pipes surround coaxial high-pressure pipes. This configuration ensures that refrigerant temperature is not lost, even when using long piping from the compressor to the rear-seat air conditioner unit.
Additionally, the Serena features a capless refueling system that eliminates the need for drivers to manually turn a cap to open the fuel filler. Such breakthroughs in convenience are neither complex nor expensive, but simple refinements and this report will describe their various structures.
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