Recent issues of your DVN-Interior Newsletter have focused on CES, AI, and SDV. This week, we circle back around to a primary main thing about car interiors: they use a lot of soft materials—plastics, textiles and leather. Like all materials, interior softs are under heightened scrutiny from perspectives including optimization, sustainability, and new alternatives. Leather, for example: it’s common in seats, doors, consoles, instrument panels, and steering wheels. It brings benefits: luxury signature, durability, reduced interior noise and vibration, and aesthetic qualities. But it’s not ideal for thermal comfort; it’s cold in winter and hot in summer. And serious new alternatives are popping up at an increasing rate. We dig into these topics in this week’s in-depth piece, and bring you coverage of new options vying against traditional plastics, such as bio-plastics, mycelium, karuun, high-performance resins, PET yarns, and more. These materials can help make car interiors more sustainable, and also can differentiate with new design signature.
Materials and design: that’s one of the important themes of the Köln DVN Interior Workshop on 23-24 April. The rubric: Interior of the Future · New Features and Emerging Technologies. Hop over to our website today and register as a participant, speaker, or exhibitor; I look forward to seeing you there! Sincerely yours,
