Left: A supplier’s display of springs, brackets and screws on the wall of Claudia Schroedter’s office. Right: Headrest casings are another of group leader Reiner Schmidt’s responsibilities.
In the old days, a car seat was just a framework covered in fabric, but today it’s a high-tech product containing 600 components, including heating, air conditioning, air cushions and airbags, seatbelt tighteners, sensors and electric motors.
Opel has set the bar high for its seats, and they comply with the AGR international lumbar health standard. Leuchtmann knows that his competitors have been eyeing the designs with envy: he expected only 15 percent of Insignia buyers to choose ergonomically optimized seats, but 50 percent of them do.
Around 200 prototypes are built before the design can go into production. “The seats are the most complex part of a car’s interior,” says Leuchtmann. While the most important criterion for buyers is comfort, he explains, the engineers have to combine this with safety and low weight. “The most important thing is that the seat must be stable enough to keep a 120-kilogramme person in position after a crash. We also want the structure to be lightweight and have very sophisticated kinetics, which takes a huge amount of know-how and experience.”
Only time will tell whether all this hard work on the part of Opel and its suppliers has paid off. Employees have driven the car thousands of kilometers, from Italy to the Pyrenees and on frozen Swedish lakes at temperatures of minus 30 degrees. “It’s important for people of different sizes to drive it,” says development engineer Gerhard Koch. Experts call it the buttometer – the feel of the seat on the behind, something that can’t be measured using technology.
Andrew Leuchtmann is so familiar with all the different seats that he can identify them blindfolded. Opel’s designs are used in nearly all GM Group vehicles, including Astras, Chevrolets and Buicks, and they represent the worldwide state of the art. His latest triumph, the Zafira’s flexible seating system, is guaranteed to make a big impact.
