The demand for enhanced comfort and safety will result in a significant increase in the use of textile materials. For example, in a typical mid-size car, textile usage is predicted to reach 35 kg over the next five years, according to a report in the latest issue of Technical Textile Markets.

Cars of the future will not only be safer, but also more aesthetically pleasing and fashionable. One interesting area of potential in this respect is the customisation of vehicle interiors. The subject has been explored recently in concept cars proposed separately by Volvo in Sweden and the France-based systems supplier Faurecia.

The Smart Forfour car, developed by Johnson Controls and featuring the first textile?covered instrument panel, is arguably the forerunner for these ideas. The Smart car is offered in a choice of five interior fabric colours. The Peugeot 1007, launched in 2005, goes one step further and allows consumers to specify the colours of elements of the interior décor. And the YCC concept car, devised by an all?female team of Volvo engineers and designers in Sweden in 2005, offers a range of innovative design and customisation features.

According to market research, women are the most demanding customers because they want everything that men require in terms of performance, prestige and style -- but they also have additional needs. Women want their cars to offer smart storage solutions, to be easy to get into and out of, to provide good visibility, to require minimal maintenance, and to be easy to park. It is also important for women to have a car which can be personalised to suit their individual taste and fashion sense.

This provides huge scope for introducing new materials and colours into car interiors -- including woven fabrics, wool, felt, linen and even embroideries. Each seat pad, for example, can have a matching carpet which may easily be swapped.

The idea of customising car interiors has been taken a stage further by Faurecia with its Happy Attitude concept car. This draws inspiration from the concept of mass customisation found in the fashion world and makes more extensive use of fabrics in order to maintain a competitive edge. One result is multiple variants of a single model. Another is the appearance of more and more "niche" vehicles.

In order to keep costs down, automotive suppliers are increasingly standardising invisible parts across a number of vehicles on shared platforms -- while making it possible to customise the visible parts so that they appeal to the end user’s desire for individuality.

With Happy Attitude, Faurecia’s design teams have focused on innovations which are financially realistic and industrially viable and employ a range of different décor technologies. One of these innovations is to use print different images on the instrument panel of the Pop Time collection. The printing is applied digitally to a fabric support, which remains the same regardless of the image applied. No additional checking procedures are needed when the image is changed. Thus the part can be produced and customised very rapidly. Also, development costs are kept low because it is easier to produce prototypes.

The fixed elements of the cockpit for all the cars in the Happy Attitude range are produced using various injection moulding techniques. Two?tone injection is employed for the instrument panel and door panels, enabling two colours to be obtained from a single mould. The door medallion -- a fabric?covered section of the inside door panel, that also acts as an armrest -- features a two?tone effect which is created by adding colour particles during the injection process. A third type of injection is used to obtain a translucent colour effect on the decorative façade of the instrument panels, the door handles and the cup rest.

Textiles are also employed in the instrument panels of some cars. And, as in the world of fashion, a variety of labelling technologies is used. Soft micro?injection is employed for airbag labels and branding labels, while detachable parts have Isofix safety and instruction labels, and soft zip?pulls to make them clearly identifiable.

The seat trim covers are easily fitted to the seats by nylon fasteners and a zipper system. In addition, all seating contact surfaces can be easily removed, which means that trim covers can be detached for cleaning without the use of any tools. The provision of detachable trim covers and the ease with which they can be fitted make it possible to offer a selection of colours and décor at a very late stage in the production and distribution process -- even when the vehicle is delivered to the dealer. Thus automakers are able to significantly shorten their delivery times.

Whether these ideas will catch the imagination of the consumer remains to be seen. What is certain is that the usage of textiles will rise because of demands for added safety alone. Autoliv, the global leader in the supply of airbags and seatbelts, increased its sales by more than 50% between 2001 and 2004 -- even though vehicle production remained static over the period in most of its main markets.

Even vehicles made in Asia, which became the leading vehicle-producing region in 2005, are increasingly being equipped with improved seatbelts and frontal airbags -- and in some cases even with side airbags. This is despite the fact that cars made for Asian regional markets (with the exception of Japan) tend to have far fewer built-in safety features compared with vehicles made for Western markets.

Meanwhile, the extent to which safety features are now being adopted in West European cars is illustrated by the European Peugeot 407. Launched in 2004, the vehicle is now being equipped with no less than five airbags.