Five simple hand movement that make the new Opel unique.
Andrew Leuchtmann and his team have spent five years working on the seats for the new Zafira. Their efforts have paid off: this car really will leave its competitors out in the cold.
Third row, left to right: Gerhard Koch is responsible for the seat functions, and Reiner Schmidt for the overall construction of the Zafira’s seats.
Second row: Andrew Leuchtmann, and Claudia Schroedter, who is in charge of design approvals for the 600 seat components
Front row: Oskar, and Jürgen Nillius, head of design for the Zafira seat covering.
Five hand movements make the new Opel Zafira different from its rivals. Just pull, push, fold, pull and slide, and the middle second-row seat is transformed into an armrest, repositioning the seats beside it to create more leg- and headroom.
Andrew Leuchtmann, Opel’s head of seat construction, says he wanted the new minivan’s unique design to be a “hit”, putting it in pole position among potential buyers and leaving rivals asking: “Why didn’t we think of that?”
The second and third row seat design has achieved precisely this, transforming the Zafira into a comfortable, spacious family car in the blink of an eye.
Seat panels have to support a load of 900 newtons, or 90 kilograms – for example, if someone stands on the seats to fix something onto the roof. They also house various components.
Leuchtmann and his strong team of 46 people work on the third floor of a new building on the Opel site, level with the roofs of Rüsselsheim. It’s a sunny day, and from the full-height windows you can see all the way to Frankfurt. The one thing that gives this away as the seat department is that there are seats and metal seat components everywhere you look.
The team has spent the last five years working on the new Zafira’s three-dimensional seat configuration: they are height adjustable, can slide backwards, forwards and – their most novel feature – sideways, significantly improving the feeling of space. Every single element has been conceived and designed here: the metal framework that forms the core of the seat, the electronics inside, the upholstery, coverings, controls and panels.
Rainer Schmidt, 45, who is in charge of designing the Zafira’s seats, has had to meet a wide range of specifications. “One of the biggest difficulties was connecting the rails that move the seats forwards and sideways so they move smoothly, without juddering,“ he says. A lot of metal went into the rails, but the car also needed to be lightweight, and this proved something of a headache.
Sometimes, the smallest problems are the most intractable. The new Zafira is available in four versions, with the Cosmo at the top of the range. This has very striking seat upholstery stitched in Opel yellow, and covering design manager Jürgen Nillius says finding the right yarn supplier was difficult.
