| According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), only 5 percent of American adult men are taller than six feet two. Shaquille O'Neal towers seven feet one inch, wears size-23 shoes, and had listed his weight at 325 pounds during his playing days. That's a lot of retired NBA center to shove behind the wheel of a Buick LaCrosse for a pair (one is shown below) of commercials. Don Shreves, GM's global total vehicle integration engineer, explains just how far outside the usual scope Shaq lies. "Our minimum goal is to accommodate 90 percent of the population. In the U.S., that [starts with] a female who is approximately four-foot-ten. She's smaller than all but 5 percent of the female population." From there, he says, the typical focus ends with a 95th-percentile male—which Shaq exceeds by more than 11 inches. Judging from the YouTube commentary on the LaCrosse commercials, we weren't the only ones who had a hard time believing Shaq could actually fit in the car. But finding a suitable faux Shaq to test the LaCrosse's accommodations wasn't easy. The tallest actor listed with Central Casting in Los Angeles, for instance, tops out at only six feet ten inches. Through the Tip Toppers Club of Detroit, a social organization for the abnormally lofty, we found Kris Thomas. He's not a Topper himself, but at seven feet even, he's taller than every member in the club.
Dressed in a Shaq-spec sweater vest, the 320-pound Thomas backed into the LaCrosse with the driver's seat in its rearmost position and the backrest reclined about 30 degrees. Ducking under the roof, he planted his butt in the seat and swung his legs beneath the steering wheel. And damn it, he fit. Sure, his knees were knocking up against the wheel, but he tells us that's a common problem. Buick lists the front head- and legroom of the LaCrosse at 38.0 and 41.7 inches, respectively, on par with other mid-size luxury sedans that feel far less airy. That discrepancy owes to the malleable SAE procedures by which interior measurements are derived. They leave room for interpretation, meaning that results from one manufacturer to another—indeed, results within the same automaker's lineup—don't always compare directly. For his part, while Shreves can't design cars specifically for the unusually tall or small, he's always happy to be able to accommodate outliers. "After all," he says, "add them together, and the top 5 percent and bottom 5 percent make 10 percent of the market." You might even call that—ahem—a big opportunity. emerson bigguns The population of seven-footers is infinitesimal. In 2011, Sports Illustrated estimated that there are fewer than 70 men between the ages of 20 and 40 in the United States who stand seven feet or taller. A shocking 17 percent of them play in the NBA.  from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | |||
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