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Sharing Faurecia’s vision of the future
All innovations featured here illustrate how Faurecia is able to combine its extensive design and engineering expertise to offer a new level of ”premium” values which automakers’ designers can then utilize in their creative visions for new products.
As Faurecia’s Industrial Design Vice President Andreas Wlasak puts it: “This is the first ever concept to bring all of Faurecia’s disciplines into play. But it is not just a catalogue of features; it is an integrated statement of market understanding, product innovation and development competencies within a full-size concept car.”
With an automotive industry facing significant pressures to keep prices low while producing increasingly innovative and exciting
products, Faurecia’s strategy is based on component platforms where invisible parts are standardized as much as possible, opening space and design freedom for automakers. A full vehicle concept is the perfect tool for demonstrating the user benefits of Faurecia’s ability to integrate standardized components as part of the vehicle architecture while extending the automakers' freedom to explore.
By presenting a full vehicle concept, Faurecia is able to demonstrate its design and engineering expertise across its six product lines in a vehicle environment, as the end-user would experience it. Each innovation can be appreciated in its context. Individual product concepts – like stand-alone cockpits or vehicle seat systems isolated from the vehicle – are not as powerful in comparison.

1 Sustainable design:
large-scale interior real-wood technology Wood: a traditional material used in a new way. It may have been around since the beginning of the automotive history but Faurecia’s interpretation still manages to be fresh. This aesthetic innovation is also a sustainable one. The lightweight super-thin but high quality real-wood technology makes large-scale interior trim applications possible. A sub-one millimeter (0.02 inch) real-wood laminate is fixed onto a pressed wood fiber board – best described as a much lighter version of Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) widely used in furniture. Proprietary to Faurecia, some woods have already been validated for aesthetics, sustainability and crash safety meaning that unlike previous smaller and more expensive automotive wood trims it can enable large interior vehicle areas – like seatbacks and door panel inserts – to feature real wood at low-cost and crucially, with minimal environmental impact. Increasingly relevant to thoughtful premium customers is their products’ environmental performance. White oak, for example, has the benefit of being a very widely available wood in Europe and thus a highly sustainable and recyclable material to use. Indeed, it is certified by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) and PEFC Council (Pan-European Forest Certification). The treatment of this real wood is unusual too. The figured maple used on Premium Attitude has been stained a gray effect color, so that from some angles it looks more like silk. To the touch it definitely feels like wood in its texture but this extra detail provides yet more surprise and delight for the user – an aspect of car interiors that is very appealing to premium customers. Other new wood types have been similarly validated while other wood veneers can be selected to fulfill automakers’ specific requests.