Adient will tap India skills for seats of the future

When Detlef Juerss drives home the point how something as basic as seating can be impacted by mobility trends and disruptions, you sit up and take notice.

After all, this is coming from the Vice-President, Engineering, and Chief Technical Officer of Adient, the world’s largest automotive seating manufacturer. “Internally, we have this buzzword called CASE (connected autonomous shared electric), which summarises the trends that will change the market significantly,” says Juerss. “Not only will we see new players such as Google, Tesla and Apple but also the emergence of new business models.”

Shared mobility options such as Uber will have functions and functionalities unlike other cars where a customer can see the seat adjusted on his/her app. “All of a sudden, the seat has to be connected and do all the movement,” he says.

What is even more interesting about CASE is that a lot of the work is happening by Adient’s innovation and advanced engineering team sitting in India, China and on America’s west coast, which is home to a whole lot of exciting things happening in Silicon Valley. To that extent, as Juerss points outs, these future trends are not being plotted solely out of traditional auto hubs such as Stuttgart or Detroit.

It is easy to understand why this transition is taking place. After all, some of the most significant changes in areas such as electric and autonomous cars will happen in China, the largest automobile market in the world. “You therefore need to be there to absorb these trends and work with those OEMs sitting in the country,” says Juerss.

Even a relatively smaller market like India is part of the CASE drive that Adient has kicked off in right earnest where engineers in Pune are working on next generation seats with global inputs. As Juerss says, a lot of work is being done for Mercedes, “not only for today’s generation of cars but maybe also for the next”.

The engineering base in Pune is connected with leading OEMs across the world where big launches will happen in advanced markets such as Japan, China and the US. “The actual development, programming and simulation are happening here as well as in Detroit and China,” he says.

Some components of CASE are already being worked on like new seatbelts, moving seats, seats with multiple airbags, those with footrests for full inclining and so on. Pune is the only tech centre that serves all Adient regions, which is testimony to the skills available here.

“On an average, the engineers here have 12 years of experience and there is a great mix, perhaps the best across all our tech centres, between young, hungry, engineers and experienced people,” says Juerss. “I think we have created a great model of learning and teaching by sending these talented engineers to Germany, the US and Japan where they are getting trained and experiencing launches.”

And even though they may not be able to see every launch in person or “every complex Porsche Cayenne seat” , they can actually experience all this in the development stage. “We are incurring some travel costs for sure but all this is peanuts when seen in the complete context,” he adds.

This is remarkable for a company which, over its two decades of operations in India, only has a single plant compared to its sprawling presence in China. Prior to being spun off as a separate entity for automotive seating recently, the business was originally part of Johnson Controls, which had entered India in the mid-1990s as a joint venture with the Tata group.

This was also the same time when the company made its debut in China. The only difference was that there were alliances struck with every automaker there whereas it was confined to the Tatas here in India. As Juerss admits, perhaps this was a mistake in hindsight as “we did not feel that Suzuki would be growing so rapidly”.

That was one of the reasons why “we chose to separate in friendship because we wanted to be able to serve every OEM”. It also explains why the rechristened Adient does not have such an impressive market share in India as the rest of the world.

“In terms of development and engineering capacity, we have 1,400 engineers in four big tech centres in China but already have 850 engineers just in one tech centre here in Pune. From an engineering capability perspective, this is much bigger,” defends Juerss.

This headcount in Pune could soon grow to 1,000 engineers serving global and regional programmes too. “We feel that we are absolutely ready for the Indian market now with the production capacity and engineering capability,” he says. China’s car market, of course, is over eight times larger with a lot of change happening in the content growth of vehicles in terms of more complicated parts, comfortable seats etc.

“In India, it was largely the very low-cost, small car segment without any content but now we are seeing more safety content, bigger cars, greater levels of comfort, better fabrics and so on,” says Juerss. For the moment, there is no reason to look at new capacity unless orders for seating come in from Suzuki’s new Gujarat unit where Adient is “fighting hard” for the mandate.

Going forward, there will be more changes in content and complexity of seating systems while the component of electronics will also increase. The company also acknowledges that it needs to be more efficient in engineering products, computer-aided simulation, big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, which means that “as we do more engineering, we need to do it more efficiently”.

India also ranks tops for Adient in fabric technology. “Making cool, fresh and interesting designs is complex,” says Juerss. “The other interesting part about India is the desire by customers to change seat covers from time to time unlike anywhere in the world.”

The company now has a wide bandwidth in its business right from readying basic washable plastic seats in Uber all the way to a first class aircraft seat with tray tables, mattresses, suspension and airbag systems. Seats for commuter trains and drones may well enter the picture too.

According to Juerss, servicing seats could emerge another potential business area of the future. “The Ubers of the world will see their cars driving 24x7 and will want to keep their interiors clean. Cleaning requirements could be big stuff, which means going we could beyond delivering to servicing seats too,” he says.

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