For as long as the motorcar has ruled the roads, leather has been a hallmark of luxury when it comes to interiors. Versatile, comfortable and durable, it’s stood the test of time as the material of choice for carmakers, tracing its origins in the industry back to Carl Benz’s motorised contraption nearly 140 years ago.
But times – not to mention technology – have moved on significantly since those early days. Today’s cars have more horsepower, are powered by alternative fuels and, when it comes to interiors, offer new, innovative materials created in labs. Step this way, Uncaged Innovations with its Eleveate ‘leather’ made from grains grown in the ground.
Founded by Stephanie Downs in late 2020 alongside Dr. Xiaokun Wang, Uncaged develops biomaterials that bring nature and technology together to create an alternative to traditional leather. “We’re the world’s first biomaterial company to create a sustainable leather alternative from grains,” says Downs, speaking from the company’s base in New York, USA. Yes, that’s edible grains like corn, wheat, soy and rice – the kind you might consider for dinner – not exactly the first port of call for making a luxury car interior, you might think, but here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Jaguar Land Rover / Uncaged)
The secret ingredient that makes traditional, animal leather such a workable material is collagen. Whether you’re a human, a crocodile or a cow, collagen – a protein – is the main structural component found in skin, bones, muscles, tendons and. It’s the body’s natural glue, giving tissues strength, elasticity, and structure, which makes it easy to shape and gives it hard-wearing properties when it comes to using it in everything from fashion to cars.
“That protein binds together at a molecular level when it goes through the tanning process, and that’s what causes it to create the strength and flexibility,” says Downs. “So, we invented a way to do that with plant proteins.”
While that sounds like a lot of time, effort and energy to mimic something that’s already been used for more than a century, Uncaged claims there’s a hefty environmental upside. “In comparison to animal leather, our material emits 95% less greenhouse gases, uses 89% less water, 71% less energy, and it is compostable and biodegradable,” argues Downs.
(Image credit: Jaguar Land Rover / Uncaged)
With headline numbers like that, Uncaged attracted investment from British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), through its venture capital arm InMotion Ventures. Faced with legislative pressures around carbon emissions, spiralling energy costs and the desire to create efficiencies, car makers are having to cut their cloth a little differently these days, if you’ll excuse the pun.
Launched in 2016 as part of JLR’s Reimagine strategy, which aims to make JLR a net-zero carbon emissions company by 2039, InMotion Ventures was “a bit of an untapped resource,” admits managing director, Mike Smeed, who arrived at the London-based venture arm in 2022 after a posting with JLR in China.
“[InMotion] focused very heavily on mobility for the first five years. And what we wanted to do was to get into what we call our ‘fund two,’ which was to look at the climate industrial and enterprise technologies that are really going to be critical to JLR’s transformation going forward.”
(Image credit: Jaguar Land Rover / Uncaged)
Put simply, JLR started scouting companies that were making new, innovative materials that could help the carmaker reduce its carbon emissions, alongside its move to electrified powertrains. Companies like Uncaged.
“While our customers and clients want lots of choice around the types of materials that they interact with, they do not want to make a choice between luxury and sustainability. It’s got to deliver on both angles,” stresses Smeed. “And in a highly regulated industry, it’s very difficult to find technologies like that with the opportunity to scale. And that’s where we met Stephanie [Downs].”
Supplying leather to handbag and accessory makers in London and the US, Uncaged’s Elevate ‘leather’ is already available on the market. Getting to grips with two samples of the new material, it’s got similar patterning and texture to traditional leather, finished in familiar black or grey. Only the smell, or lack of it, might make you second guess these swatches but there’s a solution to that, too.
(Image credit: Jaguar Land Rover / Uncaged)
“We can replicate or adjust the smell,” says Downs. “We’ve been playing around with that but what we hear a lot from automotive brands, is they want as little smell as possible.” Given the manufactured nature of the grain-based leather, the team at Uncaged can alter characteristics, such as texture, strength, flexibility, water resistance, colour, and fragrance, tailoring the material to each application.
“We have multiple luxury brands that need to have a material that can work across all of them,” says Carol Hopkins, JLR’s materiality director. “It can be shaped to have a haptic that could maybe appeal to a Jaguar customer or a Range Rover customer, and them not feel like they have the same material. It needs to feel very different in terms of experience.”
JLR and Uncaged Innovations are now collaborating on a Proof of Concept to use biomaterial for a wide range of interior applications unique to the company’s four brands – Defender, Discovery, Jaguar and Range Rover.
(Image credit: Jaguar Land Rover / Uncaged)
While it might look and feel close to featuring in a production car, there’s still some way to go until Uncaged’s grain-based leather makes an appearance in your new car. Currently at proof of concept stage, JLR aren’t committing to a date for when the material will be available to configure.
“We’ll need to do what’s called application-ready, which is when we put it into a car and test it on seats. That’s tests ingress, egress, kids kicking the back of the seat, touching everything with sticky fingers, which can be quite a lengthy process,” admits Hopkins.
Part of that process involves using robots to test the durability of its seats, with a robotic arm exerting forces more than 800 Newtons (N) (approximately 82kg) on each seat design 25,000 times over around five days. From there, it’s on to ‘real-world’ testing on tracks and eventually the road before it makes it into showrooms. As Hopkins says, these things take time.
While Uncaged’s new grain-based creation has done well to catch the eye of one of the world’s most respected luxury automakers, it will need to contend with a whole lot more to prove it can topple the automotive industry’s longstanding favourite material. For now, at least, you’ll still be ordering real leather on your next car but watch this space.
