Today I performed surgery. It’s not my first time either, it’s my second – I gave my driver’s seat a bolsterectomy. It was a great success and I am basking in my own glory. Unfortunately, I don’t get paid. Here’s the story behind why I hacked the living shit out of a $32,000 car’s driver’s seat. With pics.
Disclaimer: Don’t try this yourself; the possibility of royally hosing your seat and car up runs high with this one. I, on the other hand, am stupid and brave, so you can live vicariously through me.
Let’s start at the beginning. In my 35+ years of owning and driving cars, I have never had car seats as uncomfortable as the ones in this car. Of course, this statement is extremely subjective and others may feel the exact opposite, but for me this is my reality. I love everything about the car so far and it’s a really great ride, but I can’t stand the seats and they literally cause me pain after a short time driving in them. My left leg goes numb, and then starts to get restless and tingle. By 30-45 minutes in, it’s all I can do to get out of the car. And it sucks, because I want to drive it as much as possible, but physically can’t for any great length of time. It all boils down to seat design and sizing, plus body shape.
Body shape I can’t really control. I’m 5’10” and about 190-195 lbs, so not overly large nor particularly small. I have a 38″ waist, but even when I weighed 150 lbs I still had a 36″ waist. Just DNA doing its thing on me and unfortunately I have wide hips. That said, I’ve never had problems with car seats in the past. My last two cars prior to my BRZ were a ’19 WRX and a ’16 WRX before that, so not only Subaru seats, but performance car seats as well, and both those cars’ seats were hands down the most comfortable seats I’ve ever had; the exact opposite of these.
Seat design I can’t really control either, but I’ll tell you what my theory is on the ’22 BRZ seats and why they’re so uncomfortable for me. The reason, I suspect, is because Subaru’s simply using the stock JDM seats in the North American cars, and those seats from experience back from when I lived in Japan is that they run notably smaller than standard U.S. seats, and are designed for a typical Japanese male who runs about 5’6″ – 5’7″ and is about 140 lbs or so. To put it in perspective, my wife who is Japanese and about 5’2″ finds them perfectly comfortable with no issues at all. For me though, they definitely don’t fit and are tight as hell; coupled with the high, stiff bolsters and steel bolster bracing, they simply put heavy pressure on a number of points on my legs and hips, and so my legs start hurting after a fairly short time, as I mentioned.
As you can imagine, this is not good. It puts me in a situation of either putting up with the pain and getting a lot less joy from the car than I should be, which sucks, or I would have to buy an aftermarket seat that is more comfortable than the stock seats, but costs a fair bit of cash for something good like Recaro or Sparco. Additionally, I would have to give up my airbags and seat heaters, which also sucks (actually I know you can get airbags and heat on aftermarket seats, but there’s caveats and also back to the cost argument.). Either way, I kind of lose, and that was frustrating. What I did though, was to hop on the ‘net and see what I could find from others who might have had the same problem, and it turns out there were others, but not BRZ guys, Corvette guys. Specifically, guys who had the exact same issue with the C7’s seats. As such, there were a few suggestions and solutions they had, and those were what I did to my seat. I figured, if I have to possibly spend money to buy a new seat anyway, there’s no real loss if I try the DIY approach and fail, but if I succeed I will have saved myself about $2k. Ironically, I will very likely put performance seats in the car at some point, but wasn’t planning on it until the warranty dries up; they’re kind of last on my list of potential mods.
Here’s what I did, and again, don’t try this yourself. This post is only me sharing a car nerd experience, cough, cough. The first suggestion the Corvette guys had was to cut the steel bolster braces out, which are a steel wire about 1/8″ in dameter near the front of the seat on both sides. You can feel them in the bolsters pretty easily and their purpose is to control flex near the front of the seat. These were removed with a hack saw in about a half hour. That allowed for a bit more manspreading when driving, but that alone didn’t fix the main issue which was overly stiff bolsters in a too small seat. The second thing the Corvette guys did was to drill out the foam bolsters in the hope that breaking down some of the foam’s structure would soften up the bolsters enough to be comfortable and allow some more give. With my trusty 40+ year old Craftsman drill, I gave that a whirl as well and put a shit ton of holes in both side bolsters. Word of warning, the foam in the seats loves to turn to crumbs when doing such things, so a vacuum is a must. In any case, that was what comprised my first attempt at seat comfort, and so I put everything back together, thew the seat back in the car, and drove it for a couple of weeks to judge the results. Unfortunately, the results were that I could stay in the car for slightly longer and could spread my legs easier. Damn.
That brings us to today’s attempt at comfort, which was to give the seat a bolsterectomy by removing the bolsters completely and replacing them with a softer material in order to keep the OEM seat shape intact. The Corvette guys also had tried this, and you can see the results of the cutting in the photo. Looks messy as hell, but when you sit down on it, it feels quite nice and very similar to what my WRXs felt like as they had flatter bolsters than the BRZ. 
The rub, of course, is that if you leave them as they are in the photo, the seat cover is too big and they end up looking like an old man’s nutsack. Nobody wants to sit on nutsacks, so the next steps were to add some filler in order to return their original shape.
The filler I chose was some stuff from the local fabric/craft store called ‘NUFOAM’. It’s a sheet of soft-ish batting that is made to be used in outdoor furniture cushions, marine cushions, and so on. I figured it would hold up the best to being in a car’s interior, plus it was pretty damn soft. I made a rough template based off of the removed bolsters and then stuffed the seat cover with it and fastened it back in place.
Once the seat cover was pulled back down, I tried another test sit and it was pretty much perfect in feel. The bolsters now were so soft that there was no pressure at all anymore. They basically just flattened out and I was left with the feel of just the cut bolsters from earlier. It was heaven. Aesthetically speaking, the filler was just enough to keep the original shape when I was out of the car, so after reassembling the seat they looked like nothing was ever done to them, although maybe only slightly puffier. I put the seat back in the car, tightened it all down to the proper torque, and then took it for a drive.
The drive was interesting. First, the seat felt great to sit in. No pressure, lots of freedom of movement, and overall a major improvement over the stock OEM configuration. There is a bit of a trade-off however, in that you do feel somewhat roly-poly when turning and taking curves, not bad mind you, just more than before. It gives a sensation similar to having more body roll, but of course, the only thing that’s changed is the bracing. You feel a bit more loose when driving is the best way to explain it. The Alcantra still holds you just fine, so it’s not like you’ll slide around unless you’re really pushing it. For me, that’s a fair trade since I use the car mainly as a daily driver. If I were mainly autox’ing or tracking it, it’d be another story, but for the couple times a year I’ll autox, it’s fine. Apart from this, there’s no real changes other than I can now sit in the car for long periods of time like every other car I’ve ever owned. It makes me really happy as it’s been a seriously annoying issue that was taking a lot of the fun out of something that should be 100% a blast.
There you have it. Personally, I think it’s a little sad that I should have to have gone this far to make a car usable for the kind of money spent. Plus, it boggles my mind that Subaru actually made a conscious decision to make these seats so small. I mean, did nobody in the U.S. headquarters actually sit in them? Thing is, the ’22 WRX’s seats are even worse! I sat in one last week while waiting at the dealer for an oil change and, despite them looking very similar to my old WRXs’ seats, they were even narrower than the BRZ’s seats and had steel bolster braces running through the full length of each bolster, whereas the old seats had none. They were horrible and even if I had moved on to another WRX instead, I would have had the same issue. No idea what’s going on in Subaru’s heads atm. Anyway, that’s my story. For the third time, don’t try this, OK? OK. We’re good.
Comments