Smart Seats of the Future Will Adjust to Your Size, Monitor Health

Hop in the car and the smart seat starts making adjustments after sizing up the driver’s physique. The seat moves forward or aft to accommodate limbs, while the bolsters wrap themselves around thighs and torsos and lumbar settings adjust the spine to the proper, chiropractor-certified position to help ward off fatigue. Lear, a global supplier of automotive seating and electrical systems, developed the seat, which isn’t pictured because the design is secret and not yet ready for production (pictured above are seats from the Lexus UX concept which are unrelated to Lear’s work).

The settings are set for optimum safety and comfort and the intelligent seat of the future could monitor your health and, in the event of an accident, absorb energy during the crash and also send biometric data to emergency or medical personnel.

The seats of tomorrow could do a lot more, too. Consider the Mercedes-Benz AirScarf that has air vents integrated into head restraints in convertibles. Second-generation technology could integrate noise blocking through the headrests. And then there is work on seats that may not even face forward in a future where self-driving cars are more like rolling offices or lounges.

“We’re just scratching the surface of what a seat can be,” said Matt Simoncini, Lear’s president and CEO.

An intelligent seat is in preproduction with several automakers and will be in production within three years. It is the kind of work Lear will do from a new Innovation Center it has opened in downtown Detroit.

The center—in a 140-year-old building and former cigar factory—will develop seats and e-systems for charging electric vehicles as well as some non-automotive work with the acquisition of Guilford Textiles, a company that supplies fabric for New Balance athletic shoes and sports apparel for Nike and Under Armour.

Most of the work in the new center is at least three years from production. The advance projects tap the design expertise of the neighboring College for Creative Studies and the engineering prowess from students at nearby Wayne State University.

The e-systems division is working on better ways to charge electric vehicles. That includes semiconductors made of gallium nitride instead of silicon. The result: they are 99 percent smaller and reduce power loss by as much as 90 percent, said Aftab Khan, vice president of engineering, global innovation, for Lear e-systems. The challenge is taking the heat out of the tiny switch.

The size of the magnetic components can also be reduced by 70 percent.

And Lear is working on a 7-kW charger that will be in electrified vehicles in 2020 that is a third the size and weight of a 7 kW charger going into a plug-in hybrid next year. It has fewer components and is significantly less expensive, Khan said. Lear is also writing more code and ensuring it is in the software business as well as hardware.

Lear spent eight months and $10 million to buy and renovate the building’s six floors which will employ about 100 people, mostly designers and engineers. Lear employs about 140,000 in 240 locations including about 2,500 in metro Detroit and almost 5,000 in Michigan. Its headquarters are in Southfield, Mich.

A native Detroiter, Simoncini sees the innovation center as a return to Lear’s roots in the Motor City as the industry is about to undergo a sea change. And he sees doing advance work in Detroit as a competitive advantage for a company expected to report revenue of about $18.5 billion this year.

“It is part of Detroit taking back innovation,” Simoncini said. In Silicon Valley, the auto industry is a small player in a big pond. But in Detroit, auto is the pond.

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