The car – integral to the daily lives of millions of people – is being transformed into a living room on wheels. Motorists’ insatiable appetite for comfort and connectivity, all within a customised environment, is driving innovation. As a global leader in vehicle interiors, Faurecia is developing solutions that meet those desires. Continuing just-auto/QUBE’s series of interviews with tier one suppliers, we spoke to Andreas Wlasak, Vice-President Industrial Design at Faurecia Interiors.
Faurecia Interiors develops and manufactures the main parts making up a vehicle interior, including the instrument panel, cockpit, centre console, door panels, door modules, soft trim and acoustic modules.
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Earlier this month, Faurecia won two German Innovation Awards for its Morphing Instrument Panel and Immersive Sound Experience. Both innovations provide personalised user experience for the connected, predictive and versatile Cockpit of the Future.
Faurecia was also honoured this month with an innovation award at the 2018 Groupe Renault Suppliers event. The award recognises Faurecia’s Cockpit of the Future vision and contribution to Renault’s scale 1 demonstrator representing its 2025 vision for an urban, autonomous (level 4) and electrified vehicle.
What are the megatrends in the automotive car interiors industry and how could that shape the look and feel of tomorrow’s interiors?
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There’s never been a more exciting time to be a designer in the automotive sector.
There’s never been a more exciting time to be a designer in the automotive sector. Major technology shifts like autonomous driving, connectivity and vehicle electrification, as well as social trends towards shared mobility, give us – finally – a real opportunity to truly revolutionise car interiors. It’s a chance to rethink everything that contributes to the mobility experience, from the inside out.
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By GlobalDataThe technology revolution in our industry puts Faurecia at the centre of a wide playing field that’s strategically important to automakers – designing the cockpit of the future for its occupants and clean mobility solutions everyone can benefit from.
We are hearing more and more about autonomous cars and how they might look and feel, specifically the interior. What opportunities does this represent to Faurecia and what is your vision of the interior?
Close the door of the car, and what’s inside can transport you to a different world. Whether it’s a self-driving vehicle or a manual car, the interior is an integral part of the occupant experience.
In tomorrow’s autonomous and electric world, having your own car will no longer be crucial and performance gaps will be evened out. In the future, the real difference will be felt in terms of the available services and quality of life on board: connectivity, comfort, safety, customisation, tailored acoustic and thermal environments will be the key.
Vehicle interior features will be a deciding factor when choosing a mobility solution.
Vehicle interior features will be a deciding factor when choosing a mobility solution, both for industry stakeholders in weighing up costs and for future users in their selection criteria.
As the only industrial and technological partner mastering the entire cabin (interiors, seats and HMI), this convergence puts Faurecia in a unique position to contribute to the evolution and development of brand identities and branded user experiences – shaping whole new interior environments enabling distinctive design intent.
Thinking about the autonomous car, do you expect certain traditional plastic parts to disappear in favour of smart surfaces?
At Faurecia, our designers are at the hub of an extensive collaboration with a range of internal experts in areas from materials, technologies, kinematics and thermal management to electronics and optics integration or acoustic science. We make sure our traditional expertise in the fields of safety, comfort, ergonomics, aesthetics in the physical environment converges with emerging technologies (what I personally like to call “digital magic”) such as connected objects, smart surfaces or intelligence on-board. That means making decorative features functional and designing functional objects to blend seamlessly into the aesthetics of their environment.
If tomorrow’s mobility is about sharing cars, what does that mean for car interiors in terms of design, surface materials, construction, flexibility, and ease of configurability?
User experience is at the heart of our reflection and so we have to understand many dimensions – the characteristics of materials or technology, human psychology and perception, how people interact with the space around them, as well as the business context and competitive environment.
A user-centric approach allows us to really show our clients the value and the attractiveness of an innovation in a meaningful context. Our role is to create a concept, validate the functional and perceptional benefits it brings to vehicle occupants, ensure it can be industrialised, and refine it to the brand strategy of each customer. Faurecia’s vision of ‘inspiring mobility’ spurs us to think bigger than just the car, the brand or even our automotive customers, and reflect on the overall on-board experience. This involves everything from ways to better connect people to the in-car environment, to shaping a more versatile space that adapts to different travelling modes or integrating new materials that enhance perceived quality and help lightweight vehicles.
Taking car sharing to the next stage and merging it with the prospect of self-driving cars, what are the implications for interior design, choice of fabric, functionality/features?
It will, of course, allow an additional type of segmentation: there will be cars that are designed according to the traditional references for beauty, status, ‘premiumness’ or sportiness. No matter if they are shared or privately owned and used.
On the other hand, there will be vehicles primarily designed for a shared use, where one occupant does not necessarily know the other ones. Here we are in the increasingly blurry zone between private cars and public transport and other rules and opportunities come to play.
Hygiene becomes a factor beyond simple easy-to-clean criteria.
Of course, hygiene becomes a factor beyond simple easy-to-clean criteria. For us at Faurecia, this translates into self-cleaning and self-healing materials, inspired by other domains like healthcare institutions. But this phenomenon also impacts the potential layout of an interior: adaptability from social togetherness to individual sound and thermal bubbles allows us to challenge every single element in a traditional car interior, while still integrating the basics of functionality, comfort and of course safety.
Presumably using eyes, voice and hand gestures, is it possible to eliminate buttons from an infotainment system. What is your vision of this touch-free user experience?
The equation ‘more buttons equals more premium’ belongs to the past.
There is no doubt that the equation ‘more buttons equals more premium’ is belonging to the past. We observe a certain drive towards replacing physical input devices by other means: intelligent surfaces, on-screen menus as well as voice and gesture control. Independently of searching for the best solutions, this offers a new playground for brands to express themselves and to distinguish themselves. This freedom has to be respected and we cater to it with a wide offer of technologies that enable branded user experiences. From a more scientific User Experience point of view, the zero-button dogma is not the ultimate goal. It is all about intuitiveness and natural human interaction. With gestures, you can only do a certain number of large-grain interactions, like pushing content from one screen to another or accepting an incoming call, but for the multiple fine grain commands, other input options have to be considered to create an overall reliable, safe and intuitive type of interaction.
Reducing the weight of every car component is a necessity. Yet is there a danger of making interior parts look inferior?
The task is, of course, to obtain weight optimisation without harming the perceived quality and the perceived value of an interior. Faurecia has a large portfolio of clever material and engineering solutions that support these efforts. On top, some more radical approaches are now possible. Leaving out certain areas can even create superior value. Intelligent audio solutions can replace loudspeakers, individual thermal management can reduce the HVAC unit’s size and weight or other approaches simply following the logic ‘no gloves – no glove box’ or ‘no map – no map pocket’.
