In recent weeks and months, Ford has been hard at work producing personal protection equipment and developing innovative ways to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. After recently developing a heating system that kills the virus inside of police vehicles, the automaker has now created a line of protection shields that can be quickly and easily fitted to the company’s commercial vehicles, including the Ford Transit and Tourneo.
The protective shields are designed to help operators of the Ford Transit and Tourneo meet social distancing requirements and deliver additional peace of mind for the vehicle’s occupants.
Designed with operations including school buses, patient transfer, accessible transport and taxi services in mind, the shields are intended to supplement operators’ existing personal protective equipment (PPE) and hygiene protocols and can be fitted in configurations to suit individual applications.
As part of the official Ford Accessories range, customers will soon be able to order the shields, which have passed Ford’s rigorous safety, quality and durability testing, through Ford dealers as well as via the Ford Online Shop in selected markets.
The impermeable shields are made of transparent polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic with integrated straps for simple installation, and can be sanitized as part of operators’ interior disinfecting procedures.
Removable suction cups attach to the window interiors to provide unobtrusive fixing points for the straps, which also attach to existing fittings in the cabin. Customers can quickly and easily fit, adjust and remove shields without requiring interior modifications, and the design allows the shields to pack down flat for storage.
Once installed, the shields do not restrict passenger comfort, interior space, or operation of the heating and ventilation systems. The transparent PVC material also allows the driver to retain full visibility of the windscreen, side windows and mirrors, and passengers can still hear and see each other as normal.
The shields can be fitted to offer four separate configurations, splitting cabins from front to rear and from left to right as desired, to provide the ideal configuration for each operators’ requirements. Fitting locations include between driver and front passenger seats, behind front seats to partition from the rest of the cabin, between driver and front passenger and behind front seats, or between and behind driver and front passenger, and between second row seats.
The protective shields will be initially availability for Ford Transit vans and people movers, Transit Custom and Tourneo Custom, with shields for Transit/Tourneo Connect and Transit/Tourneo Courier following later this year. For now, the shields are only available in Europe.
We’ll have more on Ford’s efforts to fight the spread of COVID-19 soon, so be sure to subscribe to Ford Authority for the latest Ford-related COVID-19 news, Ford Transit news, Ford Tourneo news, and ongoing Ford news coverage.
No Comments yet