Managing

Kuntal Thakurta is chief engineer for GM at Johnson Controls

Beyond comfort, today's auto seat has to meet vital safety considerations. Thakurta has devoted his professional career to getting it right

Kuntal Thakurta: a tool "to design things up front in a virtual world."

As you sit behind the wheel of your car, your comfort and safety are carefully engineered. Kuntal Thakurta, chief engineer for the General Motors business unit at Johnson Controls (Milwaukee, WI), has devoted his professional career to this effort.

"The seat is one of the primary influences on consumers when they buy the vehicle," Thakurta says. "And it's the only part that the consumer is in contact with through the lifetime of that vehicle."

For example, the auto seat needs to accommodate human bodies of all sizes and shapes - and sometimes the family dog. And keep in mind that even in a truck, "It's not always the 6-foot-3 inch, 230-pound male driving any more," Thakurta notes. "Fifteen to twenty percent may be much shorter, lighter females."

Safety in a dynamic environment
Beyond comfort, today's seat has important safety considerations to meet with the airbag and seatbelt. The driver has to be able to reach the pedals and steering wheel and have access to the switches and controls. The seat has to be easy to get into and out of. And it has to do all this while absorbing road vibrations and being aesthetically pleasing, even beautiful.

"It has to be in harmony with the whole interior," says Thakurta. "Each interior is like an individual fingerprint."

Thakurta's comfort lab
For eleven years now, Thakurta has been working on developing top-of-the-line automobile seats at Johnson Controls. One of his major contributions is the company's $3.5 million comfort lab, which helps all the engineers design seats to meet Thakurta's exacting criteria. He worked for two years, starting in 1996, to make the lab a reality.

Part of the work involved assembling technology from flight simulators and video games to create a driving simulator that would help in the design of seats and interiors.

The result, a universal adjustable buck, or mock-up, can be programmed to replicate any modern car interior.

The seats are placed in the buck, electronic mannequins take their seats, and the whole ensemble is shaken - not stirred - on a vibrating table to show how the seat will work.

"We created a tool that allows us to design things up front in a virtual world," says Thakurta. It gives the engineers objective tools to guide their designs, and holds down costs and development time for Johnson Controls' customers.

Settling in
Thakurta grew up in Calcutta, India. He was born into a professional family: his father and uncle are both engineers and his cousins are engineers and doctors.

He earned his BSME at Birla Institute of Technology in India, and came to Detroit, the Motor City, to learn more. He received his MSIE, specializing in ergonomics and biomechanics, from Western Michigan University in 1992, and responded to a Johnson Controls ad for a test engineer with a background in just those areas. The job description seemed made for him, and he's been there ever since.

As a new test engineer in the product evaluation group, Thakurta enjoyed working for Johnson's diversified customers: Toyota one week, followed by Ford, GM, VW and Mercedes. "That helped me understand our customers' expectations that are unique to their products," he says.

On to chief engineer
In 2001, Thakurta moved up to his present position as chief engineer for the GM business group.

"I had the satisfaction of knowing I was leaving the lab in good hands," he says. "I was ready to move on."

Now he has full responsibility for design and engineering of all GM platforms, including trucks, cars and vans. He's also a company and industry spokesman, serving on technical panels at the Society of Automotive Engineers and the International Body Engineering Conference, chairing sessions on interiors and presenting technical papers on his work.

At the conferences, he meets the designers of other types of seats: for tractors, airplanes, heavy-duty trucks, kayaks, or even just to sit on around the house. "Although we have different requirements, we all have the same purpose: to make the product beneficial and useful for the customer," he says.

Diversity at Johnson
Diversity is the norm at Johnson Controls, where Thakurta has worked with engineers from China, Yugoslavia, Germany and Brazil, and many African Americans. He had the opportunity to bring in several women engineers when he was developing the comfort lab.

The lab, still the only one of its kind, attracts engineers from around the world. "We learn about their culture and background," Thakurta says. "It's a great experience for all of us."

Now married with a two-year-old son, Thakurta wants to pass on the cultural heritage of both his native and adopted countries. Thakurta spends time working on community projects in his Ann Arbor neighborhood. The family travels to India every few years.

A people company
When Thakurta became manager in 1997, he supervised a team of twenty-five. "My satisfaction was not only in optimizing the product, but also in hiring new people, to grow them and groom them for careers at Johnson Controls.

"The core strength of this company is promoting people," he notes.

Thakurta's professional life has bloomed as he matures in the business. "I'm happy that what I was entrusted to do, I was capable of doing," he says.

"This is a company focused on vision and growth in the future."

D/C

- Kate Colborn & Christine Willard