Car Seat Manufacturing: Horsehair to ABB Robots

How car seat manufacturing moved from coach trimmers and horsehair to foam moulding, welded frames and automated lines, and where ABB robots fit in.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

10/8/20265 min read

Car seat manufacturing brings several trades together in one product. A modern seat has a welded steel frame, moulded polyurethane foam, a sewn fabric or leather cover, and often motors, heaters and sensors. This post looks at how seats were built when cars were new, how foam moulding and frame welding changed the work, and what seat makers such as Lear, Adient and Forvia are automating now. It ends with where ABB robots like the IRB 1520ID, GoFa and YuMi could fit, and the problems that remain.

Hands holding a white moulded foam seat back pad in a workshop

A moulded polyurethane foam pad for the back of a car seat, just out of the mould. Photo: Silverchemist / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Horsehair, springs and the coach trimmer

The first car seats were made the way carriage seats were. Manufacturers delivered car frames to coachbuilders, who added the body, and coach trimmers then made the soft parts: seats, carpets, soft tops and roof linings, often to the customer's order. The front seats of a 1909 Rambler Model 44 touring car show the result, deep buttoned leather over a sprung base. Later the trim shops moved inside the car plants and became one more section of the production line.

Black tufted leather bench seats behind a wooden steering wheel in an open vintage car

Buttoned leather front seats on a 1909 Rambler Model 44 touring car. Photo: CZmarlin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Inside those seats was traditional upholstery. Coil springs, in use from the 1850s, sat under layers of animal hair (horse, hog or cow), coir, straw, hessian and wadding, each built up by hand. In the 1930s Lewis Hine photographed the same craft at a chair factory in High Point, North Carolina, where a worker is shown packing hair into the upholstery of a chair. A person placed and stitched every layer, so the quality of a seat depended on the skill of whoever built it.

Black and white photo of a man in a cap stuffing filling into an upholstered chair frame

A worker applies hair filling to a chair at the Tomlinson Chair Manufacturing Co. in High Point, North Carolina, in the 1930s. Photo: Lewis Hine / NARA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Chemistry changed the job first. Otto Bayer and his team at IG Farben in Leverkusen made the first polyurethanes in 1937, and production of flexible polyurethane foam began in 1954. Foam can be poured into a mould and come out in the shape of a seat cushion, which made the layered hand stuffing unnecessary for that part of the seat. Steel frames moved to welding lines. Lear itself started in Detroit in 1917 as American Metal Products, making tubular, welded and stamped assemblies for cars and aircraft.

Old photo of a smiling man in a suit beside a beaker with foam rising out of it

Otto Bayer in 1952 demonstrating polyurethane, which he first made in 1937. Photo: Bayer AG via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How seats are built in 2026

A seat today comes out of several separate processes. Foam is moulded, frames and seat tracks are welded, and covers are cut and sewn, and everything meets on a final assembly line that delivers seats to the car plant just in time. Adient, which Johnson Controls spun off in 2016, is described as the largest maker of car seats; Johnson Controls itself had entered the seat business in 1985 by buying Hoover Universal. In July Forvia said it will open its first plant in India dedicated to complete seats, making structures, mechanisms, foam and covers and doing final assembly from 2027. The programme will also use Forvia's Cover Carving Technology, a polyurethane-based process that shapes the seat to give second-row passengers more room.

White foam cushion shape sitting inside an open grey metal mould

Polyurethane foam in the bottom half of the mould it was made in. Photo: Silverchemist / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Welding is the part of seat making that suits robots best. Seat frames, recliners and tracks are stamped steel parts joined by welds, much like the work arc welding robots do in other industries. ABB's IRB 1520ID is built for that job. Its hoses and cables run inside the upper arm, so the dress pack does not snag on a frame held in a fixture or turned on a positioner. We found no public source naming a seat plant that uses it, so seat frames are a likely fit that nobody has confirmed.

Orange ABB robot arm welding a large steel part mounted on an orange positioner

An ABB welding robot working on a steel housing held on a positioner. Photo: Ana 2016 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Covers and assembly are harder to automate. Lear's 2025 annual report says its plant in Rochester Hills, Michigan, is "an industry first site, capable of fully automated manufacturing" of its ComfortFlex and ComfortMax Seat systems. Lear has also bought automation firms, among them Thagora in Romania, which combines vision with automated cutting, and WIP Industrial Automation in Spain for robotics and AI. In October Forvia and the Anand Group agreed to form a seating joint venture in India, and in September The Detroit News wrote about AI and robots making "dark" car factories possible.

Several orange ABB robot arms behind glass holding grey car body parts with grippers

ABB industrial robots holding car body parts in a display at the Vienna Technical Museum. Photo: Projekt ANA / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What robots still have to learn about seats

The soft work comes next: pulling a cover over foam, hooking it into the frame and checking that the seams line up. A cobot could share that work with the people doing it. ABB's GoFa CRB 15000 can be guided by hand and stops when it senses contact, so it could hold a heavy seat back in place or drive fasteners while an operator handles the fabric. Programs for a cell like this are often built and tested in RobotStudio before anything is installed on the floor.

Woman guiding a white ABB GoFa cobot arm by hand above a table with boxes

ABB's GoFa cobot is guided by hand and stops when it senses contact. Photo: ABB

Smaller parts are another target. Lear lists seat heating, ventilation, active cooling, pneumatic lumbar and massage among its seat products, and a dual-arm robot such as the YuMi IRB 14000 is designed for the small part assembly these modules need. Testing is already being automated: Lear bought InTouch Automation in 2022 for its end-of-line seat testing equipment. For car interior work further down the line, see our post on car final assembly sequencing, which covers where ABB robots work in the main car plant.

Two armed ABB YuMi robot assembling small parts on a bench next to a woman

ABB YuMi assembling small parts beside a lab worker. Photo: ABB

Cost and variety are still the main obstacles. A fully automated line has to switch between seat versions in different materials and colours without stopping. Fabric stretches, leather varies from hide to hide, and a robot handling foam must not dent it. Wherever people and robots share the final assembly line, safety rules have to be worked out too. ABB has built industrial robots since ASEA's IRB 6 in 1974, and the soft, variable work on seats is one place where that experience has room to grow.

Row of orange industrial robots of different ages on display in a museum hall

ASEA and ABB robots in the ASEA historical collection in Västerås, with the IRB 6 on the left. Photo: Dependability / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

qtran1215@gmail.com

Instagram