Ford designs new seats for 3 key models
New seats designed by an in-house team at Ford Motor Co. are to debut this spring and summer in three important vehicles: the F-150 pickup, the Lincoln MKS and the Ford Flex.Jerry Brown, Ford’s chief engineer for global seats and restraints engineering, said the new seats are part of an effort that began in 2004 at Ford to do more of its own interior design and engineering.Ford expanded its seat engineering department from about 65 to 150 to develop seats across all Ford cars and trucks with a unique look and feel.When the program began, Ford had 28 seat platforms. Today, the company has nine and it is aiming to reduce that to two. The F-150, Flex and Lincoln MKS feature the same seat, Brown said, but each has different cushioning, fabric and other modifications to fit the character of each vehicle.”We had to continually pay for the engineering, the testing and then the tooling to constantly refurbish or replace these 28 different seat structures,” Brown said. “So we took a step back to try to figure out how we could get away from that.”The first seats from the program debuted on the Ford Focus last fall. Warranty claims on those seats dropped 47% and the money spent to settle claims fell 70%, Brown said.Ford has saved millions of dollars from the program beyond the warranty savings but Brown declined to be more specific. Now, Ford may use the program as a model for other product areas, such as instrument panels and center consoles.”We just simply feel we need to be more involved in the system integration of our interiors to ensure they are distinctively Ford,” Derrick Kuzak, Ford’s group vice president of global product development, said at the SAE 2008 World Congress last week.
