There are certain automotive conceits that we all take for granted — silent agreements among carmakers that persist despite no legal requirements. I mean things like how pretty much every car now has passenger side mirrors or how every carmaker agrees to not put the rear window defogger switch in the same place on any car’s dash. One of these conceits is that if a car is designed to only have power adjustment controls on one seat, that seat that gets blessed with all all the little motors and switches and stuff is always the driver’s seat. I think this is absolutely backwards.
I know everyone is used to the idea that somehow the driver – the emperor of the car – deserves to have these electrical servants moving their ass back and forth, up and down. But think about it: if this is your car, your daily driver; how often are you moving that seat? Hardly ever! But the passenger seat? That’s the seat that gets adjusted more! You’re out there with an active, vigorous life, picking up friends and colleagues and dynamic, exciting people of all shapes and sizes, and when they happily enter your car, they, not you, need to adjust that seat!
That’s why the passenger’s seat is the one that both demands and deserves the power assist, in situations where the installation of seat motors are dictated by the Highlander rule of There Can Be Only One. That’s how automakers save money, you see, by invoking Highlander law. (Note: once again, David doesn’t know what this reference is. And he’s trying to convince me that nobody will get this reference. This is what I deal with, people.)
Now, our own Thomas disagrees, citing cases where, say, the car is shared between multiple people, and I suppose in that case, perhaps that’s valid. And yet, even in the worst-case scenario, where every single trip in the car requires a full and slow seat adjustment, the only real balm to that pain is a power seat with memory options, and any car that has that has both seats powered. So it’s kinda moot, right?
But, really, let’s be honest here: The reason that the driver’s seat is always the powered one is because that’s where you’re sitting when you’re testing out cars that you might want to buy, and those cunning car-sellers know your lizard-brain will be swayed by the decadent luxury of a seat that moves by the power of electrons, as though gently pushed by angels themselves. Will you even check to see if the passenger seat is so blessed? Maybe not!
So really, the thinking is cynical: carmakers will make cars where only the seat that’s powered is the one that’s most likely to get you to give them cash, instead of the seat that really should be powered.
Am I wrong here? Is there a compelling reason to do it the way it currently is, or is it time to shake this shit up, and start a revolution? Let’s hash this out in the comments, and whatever we decide, I’ll send a Letter of Demand to the King of Automobiles and get this settled, stat.
That reminds me of having only one electric mirror, that was the case in my old ’85 Alfa Romeo 33 QV, and I think it’s the same answer but not the same reason, the driver side mirror is easily reachable and so doesn’t need to be powered but on the passenger side it’s better to be powered so you don’t have to contorsion to reach the mirror 3 or 4 times to check if it’s ok back in your seat.
And this was the case in my old Alfa and me and other friends didn’t get it at first but it’s the right thing to do.
Later I had an other ALFA 33 the hi-end one 5 years newer and strangely this one had NO powered mirror.
I actually prefer the mechanical sliders because they seem about 2x faster to adjust the seat. I just hop in and slide it back in our shared car. So for me I prefer it over the electric. But the ability to raise the seat is something that we can’t do and electric seats can, so for that option it is better.
I’ve only had one car with manual seats (early ‘90s Saab) and I really liked them, but many others I’ve experienced (cough-GM-cough) have poor adjustability. There are very few Goldilocks zones between those stamped-steel detents. Power seats’ greatest advantage might be the nearly infinite settings allowed by all those failure-prone plastic racks & pinions (cough-80seriesLandCruiser-cough).
My GTI had a knob you turn to recline the seat. Gave it infinite settings, but God forbid you want to take a nap in the car. Your wrist would fall off before you ever got the seat all the way back.
I don’t remember which of my cars it was (Accord Coupe?), but it had manual seat height adjustment. There was a lever on the side you pumped like a jack handle.
I agree… I feel like I can find just the right notch… even the right notch for more upright city driving and a different notch for long freeway driving. I feel like I’m constantly trying to find the right place with power seats.
Power seats without memory is stupid. However, depending on the car, the memory feels half-assed. Maybe the seats are memory but the mirrors are not. I’m still wasting time perfectly readjusting everything. Or, the steering column isn’t on the memory. Also stupid. I’ll go one further and say that as long as we’re at it, the rearview mirror should be powered and memory operated.
Give me all or give me nothing.
The driver seat needs the adjustability more. Unless you’re constantly having tall people in and out of a small back seat, the passenger seat can pretty much stay as it is, it doesn’t have to be adjusted for visibility and control reach constantly, especially if multiple people sharing the car. Like in my use case whenever I’m not taking my car, which with sometimes working from home, or on the weekends when she works, the wife drives it as it’s more economical. So yeah, gonna have to disagree on this one.
More egregious is the fact that my Honda Today has power windows up front but manual windows in the rear doors. This is backwards, as the ability to remote control the windows which are further from the driver is much more beneficial. Of course, it is moot, because it is a kei car and I can easily reach all the window winders without even leaning over.
My wife is 1 foot shorter than me. The drivers seat gets moved all the time.
And moving it is easier and faster with a manual seat. Let’s torture the passengers with needlessly powered gadgets.
Agreed. I will just stare at my 5’4″ wife as I slide power my seat slowly back for my 6’+ frame.
It’s definitely odd—both should be either power or manual, not mixed. And power without a memory feature is almost pointless.
That was my first thought. Torch usually laces hot takes like these with relevant arcana. Reading some anecdotes about cars with just one powered seat might change my mind, but this kinda feels like “If you’re going to be stricken with polio, it’s better to maintain control of your legs instead of your arms, right?” The debate feels like an anachronism that might never have been timely.
In that light, it’s an argument that definitely belongs here and I’m fully engaged. Power to the driver’s seat. Misanthropes unite!
You are super wrong about this, Jason. America’s thriving divorce industry needs things like this to keep the clients rolling in. Whenever a spouse opts to pay more for a heated steering wheel but not for a powered passenger seat, a little divorce sapling sprouts from the earth.
Now let’s say car manufacturers decided to offer heated front seats as separate options. You might as well start packing your shit now if you have a toasty butt while your spouse is freezing their ass off because you didn’t want to pay an extra $500.
While I agree with your theory, the real question is why in the year 2023 is there not an option on every new car sold for powered front passenger and driver seats. There has to be a meaningful amount of people who would drop an extra $1000 on a powered passenger seat. This has already happened with heated seats
I would happily pay $200 extra for a non-powered seat. Instead I just buy $5K cars and I have no worries in that area.
VW did a weird thing with the seats on my Sportwagen, though I’m not sure when they started and what other models were done this way. Both seats are manual for forward/back, up/down, and lower back support. Those last two are a nice touch on the passenger seat that often doesn’t get those features. But recline is powered, on both seats.
It makes little sense to me that car makers don’t just make them both powered. I realize it is probably an attempt to make the cars spec seem more than it really is while some Value analysis guy padded his numbers to say look what I did, but the truth is the cost of engineering both types of seats along with reduce commodity of scale pricing on things like the motors and controls eats into the savings quickly. I somewhat agree the passenger seat is more often adjusted, but the drivers are the buyers generally so they have to be the ones pampered
It needs to at least be an option. If I want to spend an extra $1000 on “Comfort package turbo plus” for a powered passenger seat, let me!
it could be an interesting business (school) case to quantify the value of this feature to the target customer demographic.
value is the ratio of a desired characteristic divided by the resources to produce it.
the resources to produce it is easy enough to quantify as the contribution to the purchase cost (again, from the hoped-for buying customers’ viewpoint – but figured out by the manufacturer).
the desired characteristic – the perceived benefit to prospective buyers – is a complicated function of many things influencing the customer purchase: safety, convenience, status, competitive choices available, reliability, use case (the basis of JT’s argument), etc.
identifying the target customer base is probably hard, never mind quantifying how this feature is something they want.
maybe i’m over thinking it – avoid paralysis by analysis, just fire the mba product manager and make a decision:
“ya, just one motorized seat, put it on that side”. the market will judge…
Almost every manual seat I’ve sat in had controls that were basically “Locked in place by default, push/pull control to unlock.” Those controls work fine if you’re making an adjustment when you’re sitting still/parked, but if you’re on the move, they can be difficult, if not dangerous to adjust.
For example, if you want to move the seat forward by an inch and pull the handle to release the fwd/back position lock. You might you slide backwards and suddenly be out of reach of the pedals. Adjusting seat tilt/position is something not uncommon to do on a long drive.
The only incremental manual controls I’ve encountered were large knobs to control seatback tilt e.g. in VWs and BMWs, and those were among the most annoying things I’ve encountered for adjusting things.
Power controls, in my experience, are always “push to make incremental adjustment” and won’t ever result in flopping around or fast movements, and both easier and safer during active driving.
My biggest use case for a powered seat, is long distance driving, to help keep my legs from cramping. I’ve got bad knees, so being able to adjust the seat angle, and distance from the pedals, even slightly; helps tremendously. Doing that with manual seats while hurtling down the freeway at speed is often a bad idea.
My car, my powered seat; yes I’m part of the problem.
I personally don’t care about powered seats, but I do care about having height adjustment and seat pitch adjustment, which is something that is very rare for passenger seats unless you go top-trim and they’re powered.
My in-laws Pathfinder is the best example of this, the passenger seat has no height adjustment, and the beltline is so high, the seat mounted so low, that my head barely sticks up above the dash. I’m 5′-10″!
I’d like to see more passenger seats at least get manual adjustment so a comfortable position is possible. Those seats don’t need to be hyper precise power seats to do that.
On the other end is the Dodge Charger, which even in R/T trim does not have a height adjustment on the passenger side. When I rented one for a week with the wife and kids, that was fine when I was driving. When my wife took the wheel, I had to cock my head either into the sunroof area (I hate sunroofs for this reason) or towards the door. If it were for any significant distance I would have rather sat in the back.
Ditto the Mazda 3. Bought a fully loaded turbo version (2023) and the passenger seat only has fore/aft and seatback angle. My wife can’t see out the window. There is no trim level that had that feature.
But the driver seat is the only one where your positing relative to the dash (and more importantly, the wheel and pedals) is vitally important. Why does the passenger need to be exactly a certain distance from the dash? It seems borderline psychotic to me for a short person gets in the passenger seat after a tall person to feel compelled to get right on the dash. Just set the passenger seat reasonably far back and that will cover all but the edge cases (an NBA forward or Peter Dinklage). The only reason a passenger seat should be moved around much is to accommodate the size of the passenger in the rear. But that is just as true of the driver seat, and the driver has the added need to be at the right position to safety drive the car.
As a passenger I feel it a bit uncomfortable if I’m too far away from the raising part of the front floor so that I can’t rest my feet against it.
How far back do you seats go? My regular passengers range from about 5′ to 6’3″, and I do not remember the seat ever being moved other than to accommodate a long-legged passenger in the back seat.
Pray thee tell more of these mystical seats of power of which thou dost speak?
– man with 26 car seats, none powered
Why not both?
Sorry but you’re wrong. We switch between our cars all the time. My wife has a bad back, so takes my car when it’s acting up as it has seat heaters, but she prefers the ride height of her car normally. However she is constantly having to readjust her seat to get it right as her back is bad. Oh and her car only has electric seats on the drivers side. What should be illegal is no memory seats when you have electric seats, now that is irritating (again her car, maybe we should sell her car…)
Yip and there should be a button accessible to the driver to shove the passenger’s seat back at intersections — always makes me mad when they shove their great ugly heads into the window and block the view.
Then look shocked when you tell them that their father was not a glassmaker…
The only thing that bothers me more is when the passenger waves other people through intersections when I’m driving.
They do what?
Those are passengers that need to go in the trunk.
If this is happening to you regularly, you need an eject button for the passenger seat.
Yep. I drive mostly RHD cars, and I will admit that it sometimes makes communication with other drivers somewhat confusing – especially when my nine-year-old daughter is in the front left (passenger) seat.
Well, you know what they say – whenever you want someone to do something quickly, obscure the clue with witty wordplay.
I’m unconvinced by the need to adjust *either* front seats much, in a personal car. In a shared car, either memory seats, or manual adjustments please. Faffing with non-memory power adjustments takes forever. I would quite happily forego the memory seats in my car to save a bit of cash, as my husband doesn’t drive so it’s very rare for anyone else to drive my car. I certainly wouldn’t pay extra for regular power seats, and the only reason my car has memory seats is that it’s part of the ‘Plus’ pack on the Polestar 2 and I wanted the other things that come with that, like the glass roof.
My previous car had manual seats, and once I had found the right position, they hardly ever moved. Normally the only time I’d have to adjust it was after getting it back from having a service if the tech had moved the seat.
I’m not trying to prove you wrong because I think you’re not. But my car doesn’t have presets for the passenger seat even though it’s powered. Also the passenger seat, although made for passivity, is completely identical to the driver seat, made for driving. Almost all car makers don’t get this. Passenger seat has to be built differently and should have presets.
I loved Highlander. The first film. I avoided the sequel and I think a TV series? I assumed they wouldn’t be as good. Just terrible accents though, just the worst.
I have powered seats in my Z4C. On the first day I moved the passenger one all the way back and haven’t moved it since. The driver’s seat has memory positions for me (average size) and Mrs Muppet (tiny), which she always leaves in her position despite it stopping me getting in the car, and it being my sodding car.
Anyway, it’s shat all it’s coolant out now so no one drives it, so no more subtle hints about leaving the driver’s seat back/toilet seat down.
I used to have a Lotus Elise. The passenger seat is bolted to the floor, no adjustments of any kind. None needed. Because of the comedy door opening (it was an S1, so much higher sills than the US market cars) you push the driver’s seat all the way back before getting out, every time.
I used to daily that car, so that’s four to six adjustments every day. So glad I didn’t have to wait for a motor to trundle backwards and forwards.
Powered driver seats only make sense when the car is regularly driven by different people, like members of a family. Then it should have seat memory so whoever is driving will find the seat in the correct position. Question is how the car knows who is driving.
Whether power adjustment is necessary for the passenger seat is debatable. Passenger seat is not nearly as critical for safe operation of the car. Most people will just sit down on and only adjust the seat if the position is way off, such as not giving enough room for the legs.
I have never really understood the need for powered anything: Pull the lever under the seat and move it back by pushing on the floor with your feet which takes less than one second. An electric “automatic” one takes forever to do the same thing.
Powered rear hatches even less: People stand there with their new fancy car waiting for it to go up or down. I just hand close it – slam – and move off.
And getting just the right centimetre of opening at the top of the window, for when parking your car indoors, and you don’t want things to go mouldy, but you also wont leave an opening someone can stick their fingers through. It’s just so easy with a hand crank, but really hard to measure right in the first go with electric windows..
I do like the electric starter motor, and the electric wipers are also quite nice, electric power steering also really.. But for things you can easier and faster do yourself, no thanks.
The driver seat needs to be adjusted in more than one dimension. At least two, probably three. For the lengthwise adjustment, that’s in fact faster manually. But to adjust the angle of the backrest or the height of the seat manually is usually a real chore and much more comfortable with a motor.
The “pull up on the lever and it will follow your back” one in some old cars works quite nice. The “rotate the knob placed in an awkward position” not so much..
Electric tailgates are even worse. Gravity did just fine opening tailgates since the invention of the pickup truck. Yet GM thought we needed to add another motor and another point of failure.
I get the convience of powered features to an extent, but it’s always seemed odd to me how far it goes. Most people don’t have power locks for their house, or a button to push to open the kitchen window, or a motorized desk chair to move them around, but put those same people in my (manual everything) truck and they are amazed at how primative it is.
The power hatch thing is infuriating to me, when I get rental with it, I’ll force the hatch shut while listening to the little motors scream in agony.