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Thin Is In
New design creates more interior room
Comfort is king.Consumers now want an increasingly smoother ride and more spacious interiors to go along with all that horsepower, torque and styling. Problem is, fuel economy considerations and exterior size constraints can make it difficult to create spacious (read: larger) automobiles. So if you can’t achieve spaciousness by making a behemoth, there’s only one way to look—inward. As in, maximizing existing spaces.
New Design
And Johnson Controls is doing just that for its customers, offering a new seat design that provides unparalleled comfort in a thinner design. And that thinner design allows for a more spacious interior feel, because less room is taken up with seating. Still, a challenge presented itself: Because the majority of the weight in a seat is attributable to its structure, how can one slim down a seat and still provide safety?For Johnson Controls, the answer lay in the welds. For the Slim Seat design, the company uses a continuous laser-welding process to add material strength to the seat’s frame, while reducing the thickness of the steel. The company also used smaller motors for seating elements and championed parts integration, meaning fewer brackets were used in the overall construction.
More Comfort
Johnson Controls has improved spaciousness by decreasing the foam padding used in the seat without compromising comfort. Instead, the VT Foam used in the Slim Seat design offers up to a 40 percent improvement in vibration absorption, making for a smoother ride. And the high-tech foam can be reduced from the typical 50-millimeter thickness to 30 mm without a decrease in comfort levels. So, it’s thinner and better.Best yet, the seat is designed in such a way that the lumbar support presents a thinner profile for the seatback, affording passengers seated behind the Slim Seat with more legroom.
