Designing for Safety

Above all other vehicle design elements, response-sv recognises the vital need for vehicles to be built for the greatest possible passenger safety. The function of an ambulance is to provide mobile patient care at speed, and our products are designed to offer the highest levels of body strength and interior fitment fixing integrity.

Safety Through Internal Strength

We encourage our customers to compare the body internal reinforcements and mounting fixations of response-sv vehicles with those of our competitors. Utilising complete three-dimensional solid models of our base chassis, we are able to ‘trace’ their internal structures, and then use the information to generate reinforcement parts and mounting plates which may then be fitted snugly and precisely to chassis internal ‘ribs’. The result is internal reinforcement of substantial strength, but of minimal additional conversion weight.

The additional benefit that our design methodology yields is that of reduced reinforcement installation time – due to the parts being designed precisely to fit base chassis, parts may only fit “in one place”, and as such our production line operations are simplified, bringing installation times – and therefore cost to our customers – down to a minimum.

response-sv choose carefully their seating products – and even more carefully the manner in which they are installed. Our seats are located precisely, again using 3-D solid models, such that they are mounted on/around areas of the chassis that offer the maximum available strength for bridging plates. Again, we are able to utilise our access to high-tech metal working machinery to produce seat mount reinforcement parts which fit best to the shape of the chassis to which they are mounted, offering the greatest strength but with all unnecessary material bulk removed. All of our seat installations are engineered to comply with 20G/10G/7G pull-tests (dependent on position/orientation respectively).

In addition to the considerable CAD-CAM design resource we have at response-sv, we are also able to complete Finite Element Analysis simulations in-house.  Having this facility enables us to quickly evaluate the structural integrity of our part designs, identifying any potential failure points, such that we can then remove them, such that we can be confident of the strength and durability of our finished fabrications.

Another advantage of response-sv’s utilisation of modern materials and moulding methods in our part fabrication is that not only are our parts visually appealing and light in weight, but their rounded forms mean that they do not present hazardous interior projections to vehicle operators. There are no unforgiving extrusion metalworks used in our vehicles, no square edges to our lockers that could pose harm.  Door furniture has been carefully selected such that protrusions above surfaces are kept to an absolute minimum.

Notably, response-sv cant lockers are fitted with ‘slam-shut’ door closure latches, in line with EN 1789: 2007.  Not only does this satisfy the latest CEN guidelines, but it gives our cant lockers an ‘aircraft locker’-style, simple operation, free of the fiddly operation of lever latches that is commonplace in the ambulance industry.

response-sv vehicles are designed with a view to the best possible hygiene of the operating environment within our ambulance saloons, and as such, our free-flowing moulded forms are designed for ease of cleaning and to minimise dirt and contaminant build-up by keeping dirt trap opportunities to an absolute minimum.