In the driving seat to close the e-mobility gap with China

The transition to electromobility and autonomous driving means that some carmakers’ suppliers – for example producers of conventional gearboxes or petrol and diesel fuel tanks – will lose business.

But there is one type of car parts producer that definitely won’t be going bust – seat manufacturers.

“Whatever the cars will look like, whatever the powertrain they will have, there will always be a need for seats,” says Dušan Valient, director of Trenčín Technology Center & Engineering Operations at Adient Slovakia.

Yet he does not dare to predict what car seats will look like in the future.

“When I used to ask myself 5-10 years ago how things were going to develop, anything I thought at the time has turned out to be completely wrong,” he laughs. “Whatever we think, what happens is always something different.” He cites carmakers switching to the production of electric vehicles as one example. While Adient expected carmakers to assign them the task of making seats lighter to offset the weight of heavy batteries, they instead approached them with a different request – to reduce the price of seats to make electric cars more affordable.