Honda Glide Mat: a new kind of trunk liner designed to help relief back and arm strain when unloading

Korene Embrack

Industrial Design, 2024

This project was a project with Honda to design a new product for their vehicles with the idea of assisting users with grocery shopping, and my focus for this was health and wellness. The Honda Glide Mat is one part of the Honda Grocery Assist. This design focuses on the loading and unloading process, the product uses rollers in the body of a trunk liner to make moving items around the car easier. From my initial research and user testing participants noted that heavy items were difficult to load and unload from their vehicles, often noting back or arm strain because of pushing and pulling.

The design’s roller mechanism is activated with a switch on the left front side. Once activated it will alleviate some of the strain of pushing and pulling items by allowing one to easily move items across the trunk's floor and place them in a position close to your body in order to ground yourself for easier lifting.

Image 1 is a photograph of my capstone mat in its early stage, it is an MDF grey colored board shaped like a trunk liner. It has a flap fold in roughly the middle because the passport vehicle has undercarriage storage. There are also over 300 evenly spaced holes in order to place rollers (following my vision for this project). The photo is taken in a workshop space and next to the mat on the right is the electric sander and a sanding block that was used to smooth the surface. — Sanding down prototype model after spraying with primer and filler

image 2 is a low angle picture of the final physical prototype model. It is now painted black, and the rollers are painted grey. There is a 1:1 scale of the passport trunk that the model is laying on top of, and there are also 2 bags of groceries placed on top of the model as well. — Placing groceries on final model

image 3 is of a 3D rendered version of the mat. It is an almost eyelevel view, highlighting the switch on the left side of the mat that would be used to activate the rolling mechanism. — Keyshot rendering of side view of mat

image 4 is of the 3D rendered mat with some items on top of it. This image is also included in my video. The mat has 1 paper grocery bag, a cooler. A bigger and smaller cardboard box and 2 bags of dog food on top of one another. (In the video it shows the items gliding across the surface. — Keyshot rendering of groceries on mat

Image 5 is another close-up image of the mat at a slightly above view angle with a focus on a section of the word “Passport” the letters S, P, O are fully visible in the frame. Along will the rollers and the rubber texture is visible on the design. — Close up angle of mat

The last image number 6 is a Photoshoped image of the 3D rendering of the mat inside the Honda Passport for reference. The trunk is open showcasing how deep it is which is why this design was created (more information is listed within other materials for this project). — Rendering of mat in Honda Passport vehicle

View Thesis Documentation 1.pdf (opens in a new window)33.52 KB

View Thesis Documentation 2.pdf (opens in a new window)49.54 MB

Korene Embrack is a Senior at the Ohio State University in the Industrial design program. She has a passion for creating and working with her hands. Korene has learned many different skills because this passion such as sewing, drawing, blacksmithing, and glassblowing. With her degree, she hopes to pursue a career in packaging design or as a prop master. She hopes that with this degree she can add interesting and decorative designs to the market.

Her portfolio can be found here

Filters: 2024, Undergraduate Studies, Industrial Design, Undergraduate Capstone Project