What are workers who are quarantined at home doing this pandemic? The people at SEAT shared with us some of the activities their employees are undertaking while quarantined at home.
Jigsaw puzzles: 50,100,250,800,1,500 pieces… There are puzzles that are suitable for all ages, with different levels of difficulty, and are always best done in a group. However, when it comes to putting together all the pieces of a car puzzle, you need a good team that can assemble the 4,000 parts it’s made up of. This is the task of the Measurement Technology department at SEAT, which works with an accuracy of 1/10 of a millimeter, equivalent to the thickness of a sheet of paper, when fitting the parts of each vehicle. According to area manager Pedro Vallejo, these levels of precision are transferred to the final product, “a perfect, precise, compact, quality whole”, he says. The equivalent of that framed puzzle that everyone has on the wall because of the effort it took to complete.
Painting: A blank canvas, an idea and colored pencils, paint or spray. That’s all you need to start painting. If you want to draw a summer landscape, you should use warm colors such as red, orange and yellow. If you prefer a winterscape, white, blue and violet are your colors. In car design, color also plays a very important role. Jordi font, the head of Color&Trim at SEAT, points out that “color choice is very personal and expresses how you want others to see you.” In this sense, Jesus Guzman, also from the Color&Trim department, practices by customizing the paint on his miniature car collection. This helps him “research new paint formulations for future models”, he explains. He even has a profile on Instagram where he displays his work @singularpaintl.
Restoring antiques: Finally, if you are into traditional crafts, restoration could be a good option. In 2017 one of the early 600 models was restored by a team of 30 people from the SEAT Technical Centre, led by project manager Angel Lahoz. The car, which had remained idle for 25 years, needed more than 1,000 original parts and it took up to 1,500 hours to completely dismantle it and restore each part by hand. However, if you’ve never done it before, perhaps it would be better to start with something smaller. Angel himself recommends that you “first take it completely apart and give it a thorough but gentle cleaning. If you don’t have any tools, you can always use old utensils, an old soft toothbrush; and you can take a piece of sponge with a bit of toothpaste to polish something up.” He adds “if you have a set of felt-tip markers at home you can do a decent job of repairing scratches on toys or any other object.”
Pottery: Who hasn’t ever imagined getting messy with clay like in the film Ghost, with your partner and romantic music in the background? This quarantine is an opportunity to start using a wheel to throw bowls, plates and ornaments for when everything goes back to normal. You could say that this is the work of Carlos Arcos, head of SEAT’s exterior modelling, who has been shaping life-size car designs for 20 years. He uses a very versatile and fast-cooling type of clay. For Arcos, the most important thing when sculpting is “look at the model from different angles and shape what you see with your hands so that what you visualize in 2D finally becomes real.”
SEAT is the only company that designs, develops, manufactures and markets cars in Spain. A member of the Volkswagen Group, the multinational has its headquarters in Martorell (Barcelona), exports 81% of its vehicles, and is present in more than 75 countries. In 2019, SEAT sold 574.100 cars, the highest figure in its 70-year history.