Floating Seat

Enhanced comfort through dynamic seating 

The human body is designed for constant movement – sitting still for long periods can lead to discomfort and pain. Adient’s innovative Floating Seat concept enables dynamic seating during rides to increase the comfort over a long journey, as well as making it easier to get in and out of the car. Using dedicated safety systems, the floating seat contains all the necessary functions to ensure safety and comfort. 

The seat is easy to adjust: The occupant must only release the mechanism, causing the seat to intuitively follow body movements without any physical effort in order to seamlessly float into the desired position. Furthermore, the Floating Seat concept will make it possible in the future for people with certain kinds of physical disabilities to no longer need specially adapted vehicles. 

With regard to safety, the system is able to differentiate between an occupant’s movements and other impact forces caused by braking, turning, or other incidents, including collisions. These forces are absorbed by a self-locking unit, ensuring the same level of safety as other seat systems currently on the market. A seat belt can also be integrated. 

While comfort is closely linked to seat design and dynamic seating, it is also influenced by the acoustic environment. Due to its unique design, the Floating Seat is able to suppress almost all road noise. A disruptive speaker system ensures full bandwidth sound rendition for a premium HiFi experience. The strategic location close to the ear enables 20dB road noise cancellation. Furthermore, the sound-in-seat system allows occupants to listen to different audio sources in parallel and set the volume individually. The resulting cocooning effect significantly increases the wellbeing of all occupants.

The combined kinematics, comfort, and Hifi experience increase wellbeing and safety while also offering cost and weight reductions, enabled by combining expertise from Adient, Kostal, and PSS Automotive.