DETROIT — Lear Corp., known for decades as one of Detroit's leading seat suppliers, is rapidly evolving into the maker of a different product: smart seats.
With a growing business in electronics, Lear is pushing deeper into advanced electronics to amass the necessary technologies to jolt its seats into a new era of sophisticated vehicles, said Ray Scott, the career employee who became CEO on March 1.
"I absolutely believe the seat is going to be a smart device," Scott told Automotive News at Lear's suburban Detroit headquarters. "Seats haven't really changed." But now, he added, Lear wants to turn its bread-and-butter products into connected components.
In five years, he said, Lear expects to be known not as "a seat maker," but as "a leading technology innovation company."
The seats will operate as individual spaces that adjust as passengers shift and turn. The connected electronics in their headrests will let occupants listen to their own music or carry on their own phone conversations without disturbing others, a feature that will be especially useful in the era of shared vehicles. The seats will let each passenger adjust individual climate and even communicate biomedical data when needed.
