Past opportunity
Customizable Seatbelts with Autoliv
Industry
Automotive safety
Revenue
2021
€8.2B
Employees
2021
60,600
Countries
2021
28+
What are we looking for?
Autoliv is the world's leading manufacturer of automotive protective systems, such as airbags, seat belts, and steering wheels for all major automotive manufacturers in the world. To meet our clients’ growing demand for more personalised solutions, we are looking for novel ways to produce colored and decorated seat belts that could replace traditional seatbelt dying and enable to fully customize the visual appearance. In addition, the ideal solution should ensure full seatbelt performance and be producible at very large volumes in a sustainable manner.
Opportunity overview
Automotive manufacturers are increasingly seeking ways to personalize their offerings by adopting unique seat belt designs and colors. To accommodate with this trend, we aim to find a suitable and sustainable process for coloring and decorating seat belt webbing. We are open for various approaches such as novel stand-alone solutions or retrofitted printing, painting or other similar techniques. The solution must meet the high safety and performance requirements as well have sharp visual contrast and high durability.
Today, customizable design options are mainly obtained by weaving colored yarns in the longitudinal direction. The ideal solution should be more cost-effective and should not have limitation in terms of design options, such as direction of stripes. Even though full customizability is desired, the largest volumes for the solution will likely come from novel unicolor designs. To reduce the complexity of implementation, the solution should seamlessly integrate into the current seat belt manufacturing process.
Your opportunity with Autoliv
Autoliv is looking for a development partners or solution suppliers that can help us deliver visually customizable seat belts. Moreover, we are looking for partners who can meet our product performance, sustainability and manufacturing efficiency targets.
The partner might have extensive experience, for example, in printed webbing or developing chemicals such as dyes, inks or pigments which are applied to similar surfaces. For the partner, Autoliv can offer exceptional scaling opportunities, access to Autoliv’s extensive domain expertise and resources to scale up the solution. To our understanding, there are no similar solutions available in the automotive market. Hence, the collaboration could result in setting new standards for the whole industry. In terms of a long-term partnership, we are open for various models such as traditional supplier delivery, licensing or other forms of joint collaboration.
Focus Areas
Examples of solutions we’re interested in
High-resolution technology
The seatbelt fabric may require prefixation to prevent the wandering and smudging of the ink. In addition it may be essential to pre-treat the fabric or ink with a high viscosity liquor to achieve the desired contrast.
Color fastness
We are looking for a solution to meet the standards for rub resistance and color fastness in normal seatbelt use. It is possible that for example UV absorber and pigment base color ink will be required.
Sustainable process
An ideal solution would deliver a fully functional solution while also improving the sustainability of manufacturing process in for example energy, materia and water use.
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