Lear Won't Take a Backseat

Step inside Lear Corp.'s reality center, and you'll find an atmosphere that seems -- well, a little unreal. A dark screen that stretches 20 feet wide and 8 feet high dominates the room. Tones of gray, black, and white give the place an otherworldly feel. You settle behind a granite-gray desk, switch off the lights, charge up the computers, and -- bam! -- you're inside a sumptuous automobile interior. You move through the vehicle, watching as lifelike images zoom by. You make your way past sleek, leather-bound captain's chairs. Finally, you hurtle past a glowing, state-of-the-art dashboard.

You've just completed a virtual-reality tour of the Chevrolet Express LT, a new luxury van that Lear helped design and build. Two years ago, that vehicle was just a gleam in the eyes of a few General Motors executives. Today, you can not only take a virtual spin in an Express LT -- you can also drive the real thing. Early this year, the first models started coming off a GM assembly line near St. Louis.

In the automotive world, that kind of turnaround time is almost impossibly quick. Even when the shell of a vehicle already exists, as it did in this case, the vehicle-design schedule traditionally spans about three years. Between the initial concept and the production-ready design lies a painstaking clay-modeling process that typically involves at least a half-dozen costly iterations. But by shifting much of that process to a virtual-reality environment, Lear has cut the product-development period to a year and a half.

Lear is not the only company to take advantage of VR technology. Other companies in other industries -- from oil exploration to fashion design -- have gone far in turning what had been a gimmicky science-fiction phenomenon into an essential design tool. Yet Lear stands out for its ability to leverage VR, along with other digital technologies, into a means of survival within a fast-changing, increasingly competitive industry.

GM awarded Lear the lucrative contract for the Express LT largely because of the speed and flexibility that Lear's use of technology makes possible. "We always thought of Lear as a great seating company," says Linda Cook, 45, GM's planning director for commercial trucks and vans. "We didn't realize how much else it could do. Lear really needed that technology to get our attention."

Lear, based in Southfield, Michigan, has roots that go back to 1917. By the 1990s, it had become the world's biggest manufacturer of automotive seating. (If you've sat in anything from a Chevy to a Ferrari recently, then you've probably enjoyed the comfort of a Lear product.) But in the mid-1990s, the auto-parts industry entered a period of aggressive consolidation. Instead of relying on thousands of small vendors to make each part separately, automakers wanted to buy complete systems from a few big suppliers. So Lear snapped up smaller companies and combined them into an operation that was capable of making an entire vehicle interior. It also invested heavily in the latest computer-aided-design (CAD) software and in other new technologies. By 2000, thanks to acquisitions and expansion into new product areas, sales had climbed to $14.1 billion.

Lear's technology-driven success hasn't come easily. Along the way, Lear has learned that virtual reality has very real limits -- and that success depends on getting real about what technology can and cannot do. "Technology makes things faster and more cost-effective, but it's not perfect," notes John Phillips, 36, director of advanced product development, who is in charge of the Reality Center. "It requires you to be as flexible as you can be." While VR and CAD help streamline the design process, technicians and designers have come to see that there's no substitute for human ingenuity, or for teamwork, or for making a design real to the touch.

Real Models

Not so long ago, designing car seats and other auto parts was a dirty-fingernails affair. At Lear, designers, engineers, and sculptors used to work extensively with 3-D clay renderings of seats and doors. Designers would sweep their hands along the brownish-orange sculpting clay, feeling each angle and curve. Sculptors would shave off slivers to create just the right contours.

Computer-aided design was supposed to change all of that -- and, to a large extent, it has. CAD first appeared in the auto industry in the late 1970s, but it didn't reach a critical mass of power and capability until the mid-1990s. That's when Lear decided to invest in an animated virtual-reality package from Alias|Wavefront, a software subsidiary of Silicon Graphics. By 1998, the Reality Center was under construction, complete with a triple-projection screen and three digitized drawing boards. Out went the chisel; in came the cursor. Thanks to this technology, Lear has all but eliminated the slow, muck-filled process of building prototype after prototype.