Some details about the minivan concept :
Why a lounge interior in a motor vehicle?
"Younger people are hanging out in their cars. When they do that, the car becomes an entertainment area. The F3R expands on that concept. It's a sophisticated extension of the home.â€Â
To create that extension, the design team came up with three very modern looking sets of seats. Each is unique, composed of modern, metal-edged bottoms and asymmetrical backs whose symmetry is completed by semi-integrated headrests. They can provide roomy, comfortable seating for eight adult passengers.
Up front, the driver's seat reclines and swivels, and the passenger seat reclines to form a comfortable chaise. In the middle, the right and center sections of the 40/20/40-percent second-row seats fold into the floor and the left-hand seat reclines fully to form, with the rearmost or third row, an avant-garde sofa built around the sort of conversation area you might find in an upscale home.
This is surrounded by a casual, wrap-around backrest formed by the continuous, flowing curve of the instrument panel, doors and rear seatback panels. These are accented by fiber-optic lighting panels in the seat sides, and in the F3R's right-center grand entry, that can be lit to provide illumination during lounge chat sessions.
But there's more to do here than just chat. That's because Schneider equipped the F3R with two track-mounted flat-panel video screens. These allow the vehicle's occupants to enjoy movies or games whenever they want, and to do so in complete comfort, with control supplied by an audio/video/lighting remote unit that docks in the F3R's dash.
The lounge mode would be useful any time the vehicle is not moving, Schneider said, adding, "It would be ideal when you take the kids to games or sporting events, or when you're just hanging out with friends. It's a living room away from home."
But if the F3R is a living room away from home, it also offers a very comfortable and very useable motor-vehicle interior. Seating, in transport mode, is stadium-style, with each row just a little higher than the row in front of it to provide optimal passenger comfort and visibility.
And it provides convenient three-door access on both sides to reflect adult-size space in all three rows.
To enhance the F3R's utility, its center-row seats stow individually, and the center seat in the middle row can be configured as a "front-and-center"child seat.
"Today's minivans have a needle-nose quality. Everybody is trying to push the front really low to try to disguise the fact that the vehicle is a van. We didn't want to do that. We wanted this bold, in-your-face front end. We wanted to create presence. We want this thing recognizable. When they see it in their rearview mirrors, we want people to say, 'Oh yeah, that's the Toyota F3R!'â€Â
Additionally, said Hunter, the design team wanted to add a quality known as "the J-factor"to the design of the F3R's nose.
Hunter explained, "We define ‘J-factor' as design elements rooted in Japanese culture that are common to Toyota as a Japanese company and will appeal to American tastes. There are a lot of vans with robust noses driving around in Japan and we are trying to impart some of that thinking into the F3R."
"One of our main things is the wedge, the iconic profile. Most minivans taper toward the back. We tried to go against that grain. The sideline of the roof rises toward the back to provide room for our three rows of seating. The floor rises for stadium seating, and this wedge allows you do to this. The result is that the third row no longer is punishment, no longer is the penalty box that you don't want to ride in. It has just as much room as the first and second rows."
"From a conceptual point of view, this an extremely roomy vehicle in an intelligently sized exterior. It has more interior space than you normally would have," said Cartabiano. "That was done with a long wheelbase, which gives you more length inside. Moving those wheel wells out of the way is how we get the third-row row seating with a lot of legroom. And we needed headroom, so thanks to the wedge shape, the roof is higher, floor is angled and elevated to provide a better view from all the rows. Then there's the door arrangement, with three per side, allowing access to all three rows. This is much better than what you normally would have, and it creates more the sense of a personal and sporty vehicle."
And though the F3R seems to have a high beltline, it isn't as high as it looks. That's the result of what the vehicle's designers call proportion tuning. Said Cartabiano, "The cabin kind of looks chopped, but the beltline is not much higher than that of the current Sienna. This look is a trick done by lowering bottom of the car, making the body look a little thicker.â€Â
The result, of course, is a concept vehicle filled not only with intelligent drama, but with exactly the fresh take on three rows of seating, and on the usable space that vans so effectively provide, that Toyota executives were looking for. They wanted anything but a minivan.
