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Thinking inside the box

It seems that the trend in the automotive industry is increasingly moving towards using one interior supplier who has an answer for everything, says Nargess Shahmanesh-Banks.

The Sensory Future concept car shows the initial visualisation of the sensory interior
At the core of the development of the advanced body adaptive seat concept are active seat elements that automatically adapt themselves to individual body size and posture and even variations in spinal shape

Carmakers have plenty of problem solving to do, what with finding new markets, creating new model line-ups, building new platforms, little wonder it leaves so little time to keep 100 per cent up-to-date on what's happening in the world of interiors. This is where interior specialists and all-rounder companies like Johnson Controls and Faurecia come in handy.

Global supplier, Johnson Controls design and develop entire interiors for carmakers. Han Hendiks, executive director marketing and industrial design Europe admits that the interior supplier has had to change its specialisations with the times. It seems that carmakers are increasingly demanding a whole interior solution and companies like Johnson Controls need to have the capacity to provide just that.

Johnson Controls daily activity can roughly be divided into two zones. Firstly there is the advanced and innovation project group, which functions independent of the OEM customer. Its sole purpose is to provide generic, advanced innovation solutions. Then there are project groups that are set-up to deal specifically with each customer.

The company has had long standing relationships with many carmakers and so working relations are usually dependable on the customer, although the supplier admits that it is getting involved in projects at an increasingly earlier stage in the game. "We get involved with half of our customers at a very advanced level, which is at least four years before production," says Hendiks, and it seems that some OEMs take Johnson Controls on-board as early as seven or eight years at pre-production stage.

The earlier it gets involved, the easier it is for the supplier to provide a complete solution. Companies like Johnson Controls will effectively manufacture the whole interior. Therefore is you take platform development in to consideration, it makes sense to have the supplier on-board at concept stage. It can in this way support the OEM's design studios and development teams using its understanding of the manufacturing processes and materials. "We can help customer define and design better products," says Hendiks.

Not all is, however, outsourced to the supplier. The OEM in-house interior design studios have the task of giving a sense of direction to the vehicle. But then again Johnson Controls is increasingly taking the responsibility of translating that direction into the vehicle. "Because of our experience, we know the do's and don't in design. You can define very tight radii but if the chosen manufacturing process doesn't allow for this, then it simply cannot happen," explains Hendiks. Johnson Controls' job is to inform the OEM early on in the project of what will and will not work with a given vision; that is before too much money is wasted.

Another benefit of early involvement is that it allows for a more harmonious interior architecture where shape, textures, sound and the general design theme work together. If the customer was to involve the interior supplier later on in the game, then it would be a pretty hard task getting the true feel for the design direction. The supplier would end up acting like an after sales provider and the result would be visually a disjointed effort.

"From a design perspective it could be said that the instrument panel is a leader," says Hendiks. The supplier would present hand sketches from the instrument panel to Johnson Controls. "We then take this sketch and translate the design theme into the doors, the seats, the whole interior and we do that with regular reviews with the chief designer of our customer," he says.

Johnson Controls build in design to cost right from the start, as ultimately the supplier has to produce it at a given price. It takes into consideration the manufacturing feasibility, what's possible with certain processes, materials and what is not feasible. All these aspects are taken on-board at that extremely early stage. This follows weekly reviews with the chief designer whereby a process is agreed to by both parties.

"In the past usually the design concept was done by the customer design studio and two years before the start of production it was given to us to manufacture," says Hendiks. His engineers would receive the information and the nightmare started then and there. "We knew we could never meet cost targets. We knew with the given production process we would not be able to achieve certain detailed design elements. In the two years going to production you would end up with a very expensively processed product," he says.

In the end no one came out happy. The customer wasn't happy because compromises had to be made and the designers were frustrated as the car didn't look balanced. "We are now involved at the very beginning of the design process and we see development cost drop so much with much better end-result," says Hendiks. There is a more consistent design theme, a cheaper and better solution for our customer. At the end of the day the customer design studio is happy as they see their original design intent put back into the product.

But is there the danger that car manufacturers will eventually learn all this and find it unnecessary to involve a supplier? This is where being a specialist company pays off. "The trend is definitely going the other way," notes Hendiks. "Parallel to product development, we also work on new processes and materials."

As the car gets increasingly intricate, it becomes more and more difficult for carmakers to manage the complexity. Therefore focused suppliers like Johnson Controls who do interior design, development and manufacturing, can build on this and become expertise in one package. Hendriks admits that the market is still split. Although some customers are swaying towards using companies that provide bigger systems and complete interiors, there are apparently some who are still waiting to see what happens. The general trend, though, is definitely in favour of suppliers like Johnson Controls.

"The benefits are pretty obvious: if you have one supplier controlling the doors, for instance, the whole quality of look, touch and feel can go wrong whereas if one design and production studio tackles it then there will be more harmony in the materials used, the textures, the colours and the general ambiance inside the cabin," says Hendiks. "If it is in the hands of one supplier it can be better controlled not just from a quality perspective but you can start to make cost tradeoffs," he adds.

For instance the supplier can decide to take some insulation material out of the door panel and add some absorption material in the seats and end up with a better total acoustic performance but at a lower cost and lower total weight because of the material trade-off. However, the supplier can only do this if it has control over multiple zones.

Outsourcing special needs

Johnson Controls works with partners in different areas and in different stages in the project. Partners are involved in the up-front innovation processes especially with electronics which is such a large and fast industry. "Very successful consumer innovations happen at smaller companies so you need to find yourself in their network for the upfront innovation piece," admits Hendiks.

The supplier also partners with more specialist companies for what it calls its 'core parts'. One example Hendiks mentions one of the advanced project, an interior vision initiative, that is looking to the future at 2015 and what an interior would look like. One of the partners for this project on the Human Machine Interface (HMI) is Phillips. Johnson Controls keeps standards high with its own supplier. "We are increasingly involving suppliers in the innovation processes and also request a similar attitude towards innovation and being proactive with their customers like we do with our own customers, the OEMs," he says.

The company goes by something called Early Product Definition Process, and this is leveraged even before business is awarded. The process has four building blocks. In the first, the company does consumer research through clinics that often involve over 100 consumers. Then there is craftsmanship clinics where experts asses other products out there. Johnson Controls has come up with 31 attributes to asses the interior which includes visual, tactile and even psychological. Third in-line is a marketing analysis to understand the competition, and finally there is technical product and cost benchmarking. "This is before we are awarded the business. We want to demonstrate to the customer that we know your market, we know your competitors and your target consumers," says Hendiks.

The second building block incorporates the information provided by the customer, or the OEM. This includes brand identity, how the vehicle wants to be positioned in the market as well as the general vehicle strategy. "The first block gives us a segment target, the second a target from the customer," says Hendiks.

The third block looks at Johnson Controls internal strategies. "What are the appropriate manufacturing processes, what are the relevant technologies for this consumer, what level of modularity can we leverage," he says. Which leads to the fourth block which is visual product planning and this is when the team create a complete visual plan. Everyone gets to work to create as many visuals as possible, be it drawings, rough clay models or, increasingly virtual reality. All this has the added benefit giving the customer the confidence that its supplier knows what it is doing and is prepared to invest time and thought in to the project. It has also lead to Johnson Controls expanding its workforce to include experts in not just design and development, but research and marketing as well. "We have 50 people in industrial design," boasts Hendiks and marketing and design in total comes to around 70 people.

There is, for instance, something called craftsmanship process that the supplier leverages right from the start. What it allows it to do is to identify all those areas where there is hidden value. For instance the seat metal structure needs to be a certain thickness to pass safety regulations but the problem is that the customer will never know if you exceed that limit. This exercise will have no perceived value for them and is therefore ultimately a wasted expense for the carmaker. "It is important to find where there is hidden value, then take the money out of those areas and re-distribute it to where we know it will have maximum impact on the consumer's perceived value of the interior," says Hendiks. So you can spend the same amount of money, yet get a product that will be more appealing to the customer, which is really what the game is all about. For this though you need to be involved right from the start.

Each by its own rule

Innovation is extremely important to interior supplier Faurecia, where R&D represents 5.6 per cent of turnover, with 5,000 engineers and technicians employed in 28 centres across the world. The supplier designs, develops and produces six major modules for the car including the seat, cockpit, acoustic package, door, front end and exhaust system.

It is true that each manufacturer will have its own work ethic, but as Andreas Wlasak, head of design at Faurecia points out, it also depends on the relationship that exists between the automotive supplier and the OEM. "You can have the situation whereby you are literally asked to build to print. In this case you don't add a lot of specific value other than process engineering and manufacturing," he says. "Alternatively you can be asked to provide real innovation which is the case for many OEMs. Here the question is not to build this seat with less money and less weight, but rather I have this kind of problem, this kind of package, can you help me achieve what I want." Following a brief from the OEM, Faurecia's designers and architects will come up with solutions.

As with Johnson Controls, innovation work is in-house activity at Faurecia. The supplier prepares concepts to the level of maturity where it is literally ready to be "theoretically" sold to the OEM. Until that stage Faurecia designers don't think about one specific car manufacturer, and one specific program. They try to sell the concept at a certain level of maturity. "This is from a concept level. Styling doesn't come from us, but design usability concepts do," explains Wlasak.

On the one hand, a lot of work goes into researching the technical materials which comes more out of the R&D department. This includes any changes that are carried on the structural materials. "We work a lot with what we call the tough, appearance, light and colour (TALT) concept for aspects that are much more design oriented. These are all the colour and trim material aspects of the different surfaces that we apply to our products: seats, doors or the centre console" says Wlasak. "Here we have innovative solutions where we integrate the different trends that we have observed.

"One of the main responsibilities of being a designer at a supplier is to be sensitive and to understand the design intent of the car manufacturer as well as protect the original intent along the whole process," says Wlasak. "We can propose changes and modification over time that do not take away what is essential to the design process. This way we can clearly determine what is flexible and what is less so and work on those."

Faurecia may be strongly involved in the preliminary innovation side, but it also gets its hands dirty in the later parts of the development process. "Aesthetics don't typically come at the end," says Wlasak. At the design studios the designers are often working on theme definitions, whereby the overall aesthetics are defined, just not in every single detail. This is one of the supplier's most potent jobs.

"We definitely have a role in innovation, we have a role along the development process to help ensure what we have innovated is really going to happen in the car," says Wlasak. "We still have a role during production to maintain a quality level, a perceived quality level that we originally defined. We have a role during the serial life of the car, which is pretty unique."

Sitting pretty

Faurecia is one of Europe's leading seat supplier, number three worldwide and the world's leading manufacturer of adjustment mechanisms. It has the capacity to integrate more than two-thirds of the value of the complete seat in its own plants. Designing seats, though, isn't always an easy task. Wlasak explains that the main criterion when designing these objects is how to get away from creating pure commodity. "On the one side you can deliver seats as they are specified today and the only levers that you are actually acting on are weight, cost and some aspects of safety," he says. "That would be the minimum scenario. What we try to do off course, is to get out of this as no one in the chain has an advantage, not the end user, nor the car manufacturer or really the seat supplier. What we are trying to do is to help redefine parts of this product."

For instance, he says that real issue with rear seats is flexibility, modularity and storage. The main concern is to design the interior in such a way that when the seats are folded and stored away, they simply "disappear" within the car leaving a handsome and uncluttered flat surface. For the front seats, on the one hand, standardisation has become increasingly topical an important one. "The idea is to make use of bigger platforms and basically leverage the scale, but on the other hand give design freedom to the OEM designers," says Wlasak. This means creating a neutral structure that allow for flexibility in design.

Another recent topic surrounding seats is how to get them thinner. Everybody, in one way or another, is trying to find a solution to making thinner seats that comply with safety regulations that are also comfortable and yet offer more interesting packaging options. Seats have to comply with so many regulations but there is no reason why they should occupy all the interior volume. What Wlasak says Faurecia is trying to do is to go beyond this, to find a new approach. The idea is to find new ways of creating comfort, new ways of creating safety and overcoming the constraints of an existing definition of seats. "It has a lot to do with redefining the definition of the architecture of the product," says the designer. Faurecia also contributes to vehicle safety, providing the rear seats of the Golf Plus with a built-in seatbelt and high resistance tracks.

Thinking outside the box

Richard: Images of cockpits numbers 4, 6 and 7

Faurecia designs and manufactures complete cockpits. The supplier has a similar working process when it comes to instrument panel design. The innovation process is mainly carried out in-house, although in the case of the instrument panel it can be much more on the architectural side.

In the case of the cockpit, Wlasak argues that is isn't necessity for all the technical components to be fixed to one structure. He would like to rethink and to redefine the whole cockpit architecture. The Faurecia designer notes that most cars basically have the same cockpit structure with different aesthetics on top. "So what does that do for us in terms of innovation? It allows us to maximise the value of the invisible structural part and maximise the value. This way you don't have to go through a dozen validation efforts for the various brands. You can then invest all the profit into the aesthetic side seeing, touching and perceiving the quality," says Wlasak.

Faurecia has introduced several innovations, notably the front-end module of the new BMW 3 Series, which, following the example of the BMW 1 Series, uses the supplier's mEasy system. The company has incidentally a plant right on the new BMW site in Leipzig, Germany.

The instrument panel of the new Volkswagen Passat features two new functions: a soft air ventilation system and a retractable storage tray integrated into the glove box. Improving the perceived quality of these modules is also a priority for Faurecia. An example of this is the Range Rover Sport, which has an instrument panel that is made of polyurethane foam giving the product a unique feel that reinforces the elegance of the vehicle.

Tracking down trends

Wlasak sees the automotive industry as being one of the slower ones when it comes to following trends. This, the Faurecia designer thinks isn't necessarily a criticism on the industry. The car, after all, is an expensive product to make. If you make a mistake with the car you are in deep trouble, whereas if you do so with say Nike sports shoes, you can fix the problem without back breaking expense. "There is much more validation because of legislation," he says. "From a safety and structural point of view, we need to put much more investment up-front which reduces the ability or willingness in this industry to take risks, yet it makes it much easier for us to simply observe what's going on in the less risky and faster markets," he admits.

The Milan furniture fair seems to be a popular one with car designers. Wlasak admits that it is one of the bigger events, although it is important to observe what is happening in the furniture industry beyond Milan as well as keep a close eye on the fast-moving fashion industry. Many designers are in fact looking to sportswear for cabin interior ideas. Some of the more high tech material used by leading sportswear designers like Adidas and Nike, have some of the durability qualities needed for vehicle interior material. "In terms of not just material, but new combinations of material," says the designer. "The sport and fashion industry are combining things that were not being done a generation or two ago.

"What we have recently seen in the furniture industry is that very authentic materials and open untreated wood are being linked to plastics," notes Wlasak. Before you would have a choice of either authentic and natural material, or fake stuff, but now designers are now more willing to combine the two contrasting material in one product. This is a trend that the likes of Wlasak are witnessing more of in the last two years. "I am sure that these things will slowly find their way into the automotive interior. How can you for instance inject wood by adding a percentage of plastic material? You can use wood that is treated in the way that looks untreated."

From sportswear, Faurecia designers are extracting ideas derived from performance materials. These are breathable materials that don't fade with time and touch. He admits that the sports industry is very interesting to follow because a lot goes on at a technical level. There is even some R&D that passes from the medical industry to the sports one, and these are also developments that can be brought into the automotive world. "It is important to find out what the longer lasting trends are in the fashion world," he says. Those that can have an impact on long lifecycle products like the motor vehicle. Wlasak team's job is to bypass the shorter cycle trends.

Wlasak trained in product industrial design. "I'm not a typical car guy, but the car guys accept me." He came to Faurecia having worked on advanced design at competitor supplier, Johnson Controls. He admits that his training in advanced design has helped him formulate ideas. "Europe is a leading market in regards to design and perceived quality so we have the backbone here on which we can be innovative," he says. "We have all the technologies and all the processes."

Different strokes

There are quite a few differences when it comes to the question of taste and requirements from one continent to another. "Consumers are different," admits Wlasak, "and we cannot just say we understand European consumer needs and then try to export it to North America, it just won't work. The car has a different meaning to them."

One main difference between the US, Europe and the Asian markets, he thinks is that the car manufacturers themselves have a different culture of collaborating with the suppliers. The American OEMs have a longer history of opening up to the suppliers that is almost easier to "own" a chunk of the supplier. The very well routed old car manufacturers have more in-house knowledge and are therefore more reliant on their in-house capabilities

"If we talk about trends we talk about trends in our environment that influence us," says Hendiks. Johnson Controls does trend research in three main areas: consumer and society, industry and the vehicle itself and thirdly product and technology outside the automotive industry. "One of the trends we have identified in these areas is new youth. This group will be a very important target for the entire industry," he says.

This is a group that has been raised with advanced electronics, a generation that doesn't blink an eyelid at a piece of technology that can save over 10,000 songs but is the size of a pen, and it is one that has been playing computer games since they were toddlers. This generation will naturally have a different expectation from the car especially when it comes to the electronic side.

According to Johnson Controls calculations, the new youth will be buying its first car around the 2015 timescale. "This group is used to getting whatever they want whenever they want and in whatever location in the world," he says. They have been buying products from around the world through the internet and are therefore open to much more interesting sales techniques.

Technologies like drive-by-wire, which allows for less and less connections between the steering-wheel, will start to help create a complete redefinition of the interior. Toyota, for instance, is talking of automated highways in the Tokyo area by 2018. So how is all this going to influence the interior? "Why," asks Hendiks, "would you need complex audio systems in the car when a kid can just plug a stick and get 10,000 songs. Imagine what this little stick will carry 10 years from now," he says. "How will this impact our product portfolio as a threat and an opportunity?"

Then there is the silver generation, who will be a dominant force in Europe. Hendiks mentions that they have a very different attitude to life then their predecessors 20 or 30 years ago. "They have different expectations and requirements for their transportation," he says.

Another target market is women who in the US, for instance, count for 50 per cent of car buyers, yet "the automotive industry remains a man's world," he says. And finally there are emerging markets like China, where Johnson Controls is present, or India to consider, where car culture, and interior needs are completely different to the old markets Europe and the US. Hendiks thinks these regions will play a huge part in setting and directing trends.