A suit that puts years on you

Researchers at the Ford motor company are using ‘bondage techniques’ to find out the effects ageing has on drivers

IT’S A sad fact that as adults age, they lose mobility. This is true even of motorists. The good news is that a car driver’s body depreciates much less dramatically than the car does. But even so, it’s estimated that our physical functions degrade at 5-10 per cent every 10 years.

More people than ever before are living to experience this. A measure of our increased longevity is that two-thirds of all the over-65s in human history are alive today. And it follows that ever increasing numbers of these are motorists. Which is why car manufacturers in Germany want their (mostly 20-something) engineers to know what it’s like to be several decades older.

Enter the “Third Age Suit”, developed by the Ford Research Centre at Aachen. Using state-of-the-art “bondage techniques”, the suit aims to add at least 30 years to the age of any driver who wears it. Features include ankle, knee and elbow pads to restrict joint movement. There’s also a corset to impede the torso. A neck brace makes looking over your shoulder more difficult. And so on.

By the time Dr Achim Lindner, Ford’s medical researcher, had trussed me up in all of these recently, I felt like a turkey ready for the dinner table. But he wasn’t finished yet. On a wall of his office, beside the skeleton, was a poster showing views of the Brandenburg Gate, as seen through various visual impairments, another feature of old age.

To this end, he handed me goggles to replicate the effect of a cataract. Then I was given special gloves to reduce my sense of feeling. Then a pair of earplugs, to ensure I couldn’t hear quite as well as I used to do. Finally, requiring assistance from both the doctor and the plant’s head of communications, Monika Wagener, I pulled on the boiler suit of a grand prix driver: doubly incongruous because it was in Ferrari red, rather than Ford blue.

Walking to the front lobby, I felt like a cross between Michael Schumacher and Neil Armstrong (during the moon walks). It so happened that the building was holding its elections for the workers’ council at the time, and our route involved passing the polling booth, where I noticed the returning officers stifling a laugh at my expense.

But this is just the sort of mindset that the suit aims to change. “Our engineers normally design cars that are sporty and fast,” explains Lindner. “And older people like to have sporty cars too. But the suit helps young engineers understand what it’s like to have restricted movement, so they can design for that also.”

In fact, any innovations influenced by the suit are shared among all customers. A car marketed as being for the elderly would probably not be a big seller, even among the elderly. So as I struggled into a display model Ford Focus in the foyer, my hosts explained that, for example, the extra headroom provided with the likes of me in mind was now standard.

They also mentioned something about how the “H-point” – where the hips swivel to propel you in and out of a car – has been adapted too. And they pointed out the easy-release handbrake. The latter was inspired by the realisation that with traditional design, a 60-year-old woman using a car after a 30-year-old man often struggled to disengage the brake, ratcheted up to the last by her testosterone-fuelled predecessor.

There was no question of me being allowed out on the roads of Aachen in my bondage gear, of course. Having aged so suddenly, I would have been a danger to other motorists. “The good thing about actual ageing is that it happens gradually and you adapt as you go along,” says Wagener. “Whereas with the suit, it happens in minutes. It’s a shock.”

We stopped at the election booth on the way back for coffee and biscuits, both supplied to lure voters. Polling was even slower than I was, unfortunately, and the bored returning officers were no longer laughing. Which is just as well, because with the elbow wraps and neck brace, it was a big struggle to make the coffee cup and my mouth meet in roughly the same place.

Its educational properties aside, the best thing about the Third Age Suit was that, unlike the advanced age it simulates, I didn’t have to keep it. As I handed the doctor back his corset I could say, in all honesty, that it had taken years off me.