A week after Barbara Halvey took her 1998 Ford Contour to a Chrysler dealer in Burlington, WI for an inspection of a child seat, her car was slammed from behind and shoved into a car in front.Despite this serious "sandwich" accident, Ms. Halvey's...
Ford Motor Co. will spend about $15 million in the next year to distribute 1 million child booster seats as part of its Boost America! campaign designed to protect children between the ages of 4 and 8 who are too big for child safety seats and too...
Automotive designers used to have three choices when it came to decorative trim for interiors: real wood, fake wood, or just plain plastic. That left little room to create a unique personality for a specific car or truck.But automotive design now...
Lear Corp. says its common architecture for interiors can reduce engineering, tooling and design cost, but don't look for automakers to offer completely customized interiors any time soon.Lear demonstrates a completely flexible interior that would...
It wasn't that long ago when a seat was just a seat. German cars had seats that were rock hard, and those in American cars were puffy overstuffed couches. Everybody else was somewhere in-between, and that was the limit of seating variety.Now there...
I've seen three cars, the new Jaguar S-Type, the Audi TT sports Coupe - both coming here - and the Rover 75 sedan, which isn't being sold in the U.S.As the old Chrysler ads say, this trio of designs, particularly the interiors of the Audi and...
So much for the theory that Lear Corp., Johnson Controls Inc. and Magna International Inc. are locking up the North American interiors market.United Technologies Automotive has scored a major strategic coup by winning a General Motors Corp...
The last few years have been tough on ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) thermoplastics. In just about every application, it seems ABS has been losing ground to arch-rival polypropylene (PPO), which appears poised to deliver a knockout punch at...
Well, we can't state with absolute certainty that Johnson Controls, Lear and Magna have never put their products into orbit. But we do know that Recaro, the German specialty seat maker pushing heavily for more North American business, plays a bit...
He's not making any promises, but 3M's Thomas F. Beddow is expecting big things from the auto industry."I think there could be another 3M just in automotive," says Mr. Beddow, executive director of the 3M Automotive Industry Center in suburban...