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AWD*V70XC
03-02-2004, 02:55 PM
The following details have been released for the new YCC (Your Concept Car) Officially launched at the Geneva Motoe Show, Switzerland.

The car will never been seen on the road 'as is' but some of the ideas used will be shown in future cars and this is why I have included it here as some of the ideas might very well be put in the new 'XC50' or 'XC30' if they make it to the production line.

The car has some very interesting points which I will briefly describe to you.
1. the driving pedals retract when you switch off the engine
2. the 'gear stick' is located on the steering wheel
3. the brake lights progressively turn from yellow to red
4. at the bottom of the gull wing doors, the sill rotates down to allow better access
5. the hand brake is electronic
6. there is no hood/bonnet to access the engine compartment
7. the only user points are the fuel and washer bottle access 'holes'
8. the entire vehicle is made of self cleaning materials therefore dirt will not 'stick' to the car and a simply wash or rain burst will clean the outside of the car including the glass.
9. the rear seat base folds up to allow you better use of the area for storage of sports bags, laptops etc.

The following is an official press release

YOUR CONCEPT CAR
– BOLD BUT ELEGANT EXTERIOR

An excellent view from the driver’s seat was high on YCC wish-lists.

In many cars, it can be difficult to see to all four corners. his can make a car hard to park or to pilot through tight spots. But in the YCC it is easy to see where the car starts and where it ends, because the front end is low, the fenders have been brought into sight and the traditional Volvo V on the bonnet section has been inverted.

The effect is reminiscent of the Volvo P1800, giving the car a sporty look and the driver full command of the situation ahead. The equivalent has been achieved at the rear end, where the rear window extends almost all the way to where the car ends.

The lines of the YCC’s ‘catwalk’ give it a look which is muscular and elegant at the same time.

The YCC is a car of many contrasts. It is functional and user
friendly, yet sporty and emotional. Its exterior styling strikes a
balance between all these qualities. That is why the YCC has:

• a low front end and a long rear window, for an excellent view all round
• bumpers and lower side sections covered with a tough, durable material, in contrast to its suave upper bodywork
• muscular shoulders and catwalk
• gull-wing doors
• headlights with an ethereal, liquid quality

CHAMELEON WITH VARIABLE RIDE HEIGHT
The YCC is as big as the Volvo S60. Its variable ride height function enables it to be raised or lowered either when driving or when parked.

It is a car which combines sportiness and robustness and the exterior design strives for a balance between these characteristics. Its skidplates emphasize the functionality.

Its bumpers and lower side sections are made of a tough, durable material, for an enhanced functional feel. This effect is balanced by the streamlined beauty of the body panels. They have been finished in Chameleon, a ‘flip’ (colour-change)
paint for an iridescent, silky look. Depending on the light, the exterior flip colour Chameleon changes from green to gold or blue to yellow.

ICE EFFECT
The head- and tail-lights are important elements of the YCC’s styling. The headlights are lenses of transparent thermoplastic which project the light from banks of LEDs. The effect is that of light emanating from a block of ice. No bulbs or LEDs visible, just light.

The rear light clusters enhance the characteristic look of this Volvo. Here the red section flows seamlessly into the yellow.

The high-level brake light is at the top edge of the rear window. If the driver brakes hard, the red area grows bigger. If the driver has to brake extra hard, the brake light pulsates.

GULL-WING DOORS OF SHORT WING SPAN
The YCC was designed with wide side door openings.
• for better display of the car interior
• for easier back seat loading and unloading
• to make it an easier car to get in and out of.

Eye-catching gull-wing doors of short wing span were the perfect answer for the YCC.

When closed, the gull-wing door extends only as far as the bottom of the painted body sections, which means that it extends only 60 cm out from the car when opened. Less space than many conventional car doors need to open fully.

As the gull-wing door opens upwards, the sill section below it opens out and down. The advantages are that there is no high sill to climb over and that the surface presented is always a clean one.

Another advantage of the door solution is that the B-pillar has been moved further back, further enhancing the driver’s view of the road.

When the gull-wing door opens up, the door sill rotates down, making it easier for driver and passengers to get in and out of the car. The drop-down sill has a dual function (besides allowing a smaller wing span for the gull-wing door): it makes
for easier entry and exit and it also presents a clean interior surface. No risk of brushing against grimy car exterior surfaces and soiling your clothes.

The YCC was designed to suit the individual. You choose the information and settings you want. You choose how you like the interior to look and how high you like to ride.

Some of the interior benefits in the YCC are:
• Ergovision – ergonomics plus optimum line of vision
in a patented concept
• easy to get in and out of
• airy interior characterised by an extreme sense of space
• everything within reach
• multi-purpose storage
• light interior with honest materials
• more a living room than a lounge or a cockpit,
with modern furnishing fabrics
• choice of eight upholstery and carpet styles,
easily switched to match mood, season or trends

Inside the car too, interior designer Cindy Charwick wanted to improve access and comfort for the driver. When you get into the car, the side support in the seat will have been lowered for you. The whole seat will also be in its lowest and furthest-
back position and both steering wheel and car body will be raised. All these settings add up to maximum freedom of movement before you close the door. Then the side supports in the seat will return to their comfortable, cocooning driving
position.

PERSONALISED DRIVING POSITION
A key ambition in developing the YCC was to ensure that the driver, regardless of height, would be able to sit correctly when driving and have the right line of vision too. The result was Ergovision (patent pending) – ergonomics and optimum line of vision in one system.

Your whole body is scanned at the dealership, then this data is used to define a driving position just for you. This is stored in digital form on your key unit. Once you get into the driver’s seat and dock your key on the centre console, the seat,
steering wheel, pedals, head restraint and seat belt will all be adjusted automatically to suit your personal build. The result is a sound driving position with the best line of vision for you.

If you want to alter the stored position, you can change the settings of the various car components in the system, then store that set of data on your key unit.

The system will warn you if your line of vision is wrong by means of the lenticular hologram, an eye symbol displayed on the A-pillar, between windscreen and door.

The YCC has other features designed to make your driving posture as comfortable as possible, for trouble-free driving. The design philosophy was that, wherever the car can be made to adapt itself to suit the driver, this provision should be
made. Because the height of the driver’s shoe heels may differ from one day to the next, the driver heel rest was made fully adjustable. And the head restraint has been adapted to cater for hair styles like pony-tails.

SPACE AND CONVENIENCE
The interior design of the YCC is a balance between the driver’s need for as much space as possible and the need to have all the most important things within easy reach.

“It was all part of the aim of making life easier. The cabin environment has been designed so that everything you need is at your fingertips. And your surroundings need to make you feel good too,” says interior designer Cindy Charwick.

Inside the car, she has echoed the flowing lines of the exterior styling. The instrument panel is S-shaped, adding to the sense of space and air in the cabin. And to reinforce the floating, hovering impression the exterior gives, with its colour-change paint and the lift of its gull-wing doors, the front seat mountings have been moved inwards, out of sight. The seats look as though they are hovering above the floor.

Elegance is built into other interior features too. The ambient lighting follows the lines of the car at the side, the ventilation is concealed and the roof lining between the glazed moon roof is a shimmering star ceiling produced through a unique material made by fibre optics.

CONTROLS AND INSTRUMENTS
The YCC is packed with smart technology, but the technology has not been allowed to complicate matters for the driver. So the instrument panel is clean cut, simple and restrained. There are few instruments, but those there are are close to your line of sight. The gear levers are by the steering wheel.

All non-essentials have been removed – what you see is your speed, how far you can drive before you need to refuel and how to find your way. In other words, a speedometer, a distance indicator and a navigation system. All other information can be accessed using the control panel alongside the steering wheel. Everything is easy to reach, easy to understand and easy to operate.

STORAGE
The YCC has storage options in new places. Moving the gear levers up by the steering wheel and making the electronic parking brake automatic has freed up all the space between the front seats. An ideal place for keeping things you might
want on the journey. Drivers should not have to worry about things like mobiles or where to find some small change in a hurry. Here there are both shallow compartments and deep ones, with room for things like your notebook computer,
handbag, parking money, drinks, keys, CDs and mobile phone.

And the main function of the rear seat is not that of carrying passengers – it is for carrying things, because that is what the target group mostly use it for. Here there is all the room you want for briefcases, carrier bags and bags full of sports
gear.

The rear seat is actually two separate fold-down seats. They are rather like cinema seats, so they spring back up when not in use – to make even more space for storage. And the compartment on the back of the front seat is actually a
removable compact briefcase. The boot is big enough for a set of golf clubs.

HONEST MATERIALS AND LIGHT
Spaciousness and light are the key impressions conveyed by the interior. Sitting in the YCC, you get a strong sense of being in a living room. The colour and trim is strongly influenced by home interior design.

“Let’s bring the living room into the car. Let’s use materials we have in the home – honest materials, not obscured by coats of shiny enamel,” was the way Maria Uggla, the designer responsible for Colour and Trim, felt about it.

The YCC is exceptionally light in the inside, rather like a modern living room with big windows and skylights. Scandinavian light was the real inspiration. Here the interior surface materials set the tone and the light spectrum. Specially selected to avoid weighing down the interior in any way, they reinforce and amplify the space within the car. All the horizontal surfaces are of laminated bleached oak, augmented by all functional surfaces in brushed aluminium.

Another innovation is the use of pale plastic sheeting behind a transparent layer in places like the centre of the instrument panel – plastic used to real advantage. The speaker grilles combine white and silver in a random pattern. The side panels,
doors and rear seats have been tied together through a light eggshell colour.

DÉCOR TO MATCH YOUR TASTE
Just as light-coloured walls in a living room focus attention on the furniture, all the pale surfaces in the YCC mean your eye is caught at once by the seats and carpets. This is where the real scope for individuality comes into play – the chance to alter your car interior according to trends, personal taste or style. A range of eight seat pad options with matching carpets means that you can decorate your car to match your personal taste.

Swapping them over is quick and easy and they are easy to care for. Some are machine washable, others dry clean only. A range so wide that everyone can find a personal favourite. The options are:

• dark brown leather.A traditional upholstery option in soft leather, complemented by a short-pile carpet of tufted linen.
• black-brown woven leather. A bold, sporty option. Complemented by a multicoloured carpet of tufted linen with orange, grey-green, beige, wine and yellowgreen elements.
• beige linen accented with lime-green highlights. A more subdued style, complemented by a bouclé-based wool and linen carpet, with lime green stripes of tufted linen.
• checked woollen bouclé. A retro fabric in black and lime-yellow which flirts with the 1950s and modern interior design trends. Complemented by a carpet of black woollen felt.
• red wool. A thick, warm covering. The carpet is made of the same type of material.
• cream felted wool. A more restrained choice. Complemented by a carpet of woven bouclé with green and grey accents.
• grey nubuck. An elegant option complemented by a tufted deep-pile carpet.
• shimmering pale yellow with embroidered flowers. The least conventional option. Complemented by a bouclé-based dark brown carpet with strands of pale yellow linen.

All the materials would work equally well in a living room. Many of them have never before been used in cars. Each seat top option has its own label, reinforcing the link with home interiors.

The descriptions and data contained in this press material (release) apply to the international model range of Volvo Car Corporation. Specifications may vary from country to country and change without notice.

• Hi-Tech: Personalised driving position and ‘Autopark’ for easy parking
• Gull-wing doors for easier access and improved visibility
• Choice and flexibility: the interior can be easily personalised or updated
• Smart interior storage solutions for laptops, mobiles, etc
• Ease of maintenance: Easy-clean paint, exterior screen washing filler points and self diagnostics to automatically book services
• Designed by an all-women team to target the most demanding premium customer: the independent, professional car buyer
Storage
“Moving the gear levers up by the steering wheel and using an integrated, electronic handbrake freed up space for storage in the centre console,” says Cindy Charwick, who designed the YCC's interior.

As a result, the centre console has space for a shallow compartment for keys, mobile phones, coins and other small items, and deeper ones big enough for bags and laptop computers. A wastepaper basket completes the theme of sheer convenience.

Cinema Style Rear Seats
“Most of our target group said they carry a bag in the rear seat far more often than passengers. So we decided to design that area primarily for storage but with cinema style seats instantly convertible for two passengers whenever needed,” says Camilla Palmertz, one of the project managers.

Gull-wing Door
“We chose a gull-wing door with a modest wingspan to help us showcase the YCC’s interior solutions,” says Elna Holmberg, technical project manager. It also brought other advantages. It increases your visibility over your shoulder because the B-pillar is further back and makes it easy to load items behind the driver’s seat.

To avoid the gull-wing doors being impractical they are split into two smaller upper and lower sections. The lower sill section lowers automatically when the door is opened.

This is how it works. Your body is scanned at your Volvo dealer and the data of your proportions (height, leg length, arm length etc) is digitally stored on your key. When you put your key on the centre console, the seat, steering wheel, pedals, head restraint and seat belt will be adjusted automatically to suit your personalised driving position.

Space-check and Autopark
Parallel parking assistance is a function both males and females requested. When you need to park between two cars, first you need to check there's enough space. Pull up alongside the space and press the YCC's parking assistance button once for the 'space-check' function. If the system says yes, you can then select the 'Autopark' function and the car helps with the steering to manoeuvre into the space, while the driver still controls the accelerator, brakes and gearshift.

MORE CHOICE AND FLEXIBILITY
• Eight choices of interchangeable interior décor
• Adjustable ride height

The YCC feels exceptionally light and spacious inside, rather like a modern living room inspired by a Scandinavian design using natural materials and plenty of natural and ambient lighting.

But the YCC is designed to suit individual tastes and choices of décor. You can radically change the look of the car interior whenever you feel like it. There are eight exchangeable (and washable) seat pad options to choose from, everything from dark
brown leather, linen and wool, to a shimmering yellow-green embroidered seat pad. Each has a matching carpet – also easy to swap over – for a whole range of styles inspired by Scandinavian interior design.

“No need to trade in your car just because you have grown tired of its colour scheme!” says Maria Uggla, the colour and trim designer for the YCC.

For all-round flexibility you can also choose the ride height – either high, if you like a commanding view of the road, or low, for a sportier feel.

MINIMAL MAINTENANCE
• Exterior filling points for fuel and washer fluid
• Automatic diagnostic checks
• Easy-clean paint

The YCC has made car care about as easy as it can get.

“The only time I ever open my bonnet is when I need to fill up with windscreen washer fluid,” says Tatiana Butovitsch Temm, YCC communications manager. “So we asked ourselves whether you should have to open the bonnet just to do that. We realised that it could just as easily be done from the outside of the car.”

That is why the YCC has two filling points like those used for racing cars beside the door on the driver’s side. One for petrol, the other for washer fluid. No fumbling with filler caps or bonnet latches!

The YCC also carries out its own diagnostic checks at regular intervals and notifies your service centre if anything needs attention and arranges a service too. This also ensures that any spare parts or materials will be there when they are needed.

An easy-clean exterior paint finish behaves rather like the coating on a non-stick pan – dirt finds it very hard to cling on in the first place and, if it does, it washes off very easily.

ENGINE AND TRANSMISSION
• 5-cylinder, 215bhp engine
• Integrated Starter-Generator (ISG)

The YCC is prepared for a low-emission 215 bhp, five-cylinder engine with Volvo's Integrated Starter-Generator (ISG). This has several advantages. It prevents unnecessary idling by shutting down the engine automatically when waiting at traffic lights, for instance. It comes to life again as soon as the driver presses the accelerator. It also provides extra torque at low revs, which means maximum power right from the start.

The YCC has a six-speed Powershift gearbox. You can either choose a fully automatic mode, or use the controls on the steering column to change gear.

Women buy more cars than ever and represent an increasingly important group of customers with 54 per cent of Volvos in America now bought by women, for example.

Volvo has a long-standing tradition of researching women’s requirements in a car. As early as the 1980s, a reference group of female Volvo staff was set up to test and assess new models at early stages of their development. And more recently, during the development of the XC90, a women’s focus group was convened in California – the homeland of the SUV – to help shape the Volvo SUV’s distinctive features and design.

The descriptions and data contained in this press material (release) apply to the international model range
of Volvo Car Corporation. Specifications may vary from country to country and change without notice.

Photos follow;
http://www.xc70.com/pics/albums/userpics/thumb_YCC%20front%20LR%7E0.jpghttp://www.xc70.com/pics/albums/userpics/thumb_YCC%20Rear%20LR.jpghttp://www.xc70.com/pics/albums/userpics/thumb_Filler%20Caps%20LR.jpghttp://www.xc70.com/pics/albums/userpics/thumb_YCC%20Inside%20LR.jpg

dcawd
03-03-2004, 11:20 AM
Some interesting ideas; wonder which ones will make it into productions and when.   However, I wonder about the wisdom of an electronic hand brake--what happens in the event of an electronic failure (backups notwithstanding)?  Maybe one could store an anchor in all the space that going electronic frees up, which could be thrown out of the window in emergencies...