| 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
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Kate Colborn & Christine Willard | 
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