Seats too relaxed/reclined?!

I'm 6'2", 190 lbs, 35" inseam, long legs and arms, good shape and seating is working quite well for me. I'm sort of infamous around here for opinions on Prius and other car's driver's seats. I went through a maddening mistake of buying the 2nd generation Prius and never got happy after building a custom driver's seat.
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Some suggestions -

- Do some Google research on how to adjust driver's seat for optimal position. It's possible you just have a bad habit going on.

How to Adjust Seating to the Proper Position While Driving - wikiHow, the free how-to guide

- try not to drive so much with big bulky soles on shoes. That decreases legroom a tiny bit

- If it feels like there is too much thigh support, or it's pressing into thighs too much, you pretty much must slide forward a notch or two. At your height, I don't think you should be slid all the way back. I'm 2 notches forward from full back, and I'm 3" taller than you.

- You don't want to have your seatback bolt upright. I've read articles on car seat adjustment and ergonoics and you seatback should be slightly reclined. Something about like 10 to 20 degrees? reclined back. 45 is too much.

- another mentioned the steering wheel is hard to reach and many would like it to pull a little closer. The telescope is sort of biaed to accomodate the shortest people who may slide really close to the dash. About the only thing to do is slide forward to accomodate.

- Your head should be at least a few inches from the roof! You should just about be able to put your fist between your head and the roof.

- Unfortunately there is no way to adjust the seat bottom tilt. If you had got the 2012 Four, you'd be set because it has the power driver's seat and power lumbar support.

- I think generally it's not a bad seat at all in this Prius. It stacks up pretty well to many other cars out there. It's not quite as good as Camry seating, but on other hand, it's a lot better than many other cars I've seen out there.

 

Here's my 2011 seat slid all the way forward, rest the same. Seatback angle isn't much, maybe 10 to 20 degrees.



Here's my Accord Coupe seat. Prius seat is actually more comfortable because of softer seat bottom. Accord seat had a bit more lumbar support.

 

2012 Prius Four base gets the power Softex seat also, $29k sticker price.

 

2012 Prius Four gets the power Softex seat also, $29k sticker price.

 

Auto engineers put a lot of effort into driver's seat design for safety, comfort, cost, and adjustability for a wide range of people. Every model has a different seat in it. They do try hard.

 

Get out of the habit of having your seat really bolt upright or totally vertical. If you research, you will see that is not recommended. You should have a slight recline off vertical of something like 10 or 20 degrees give or take.

 

If you do a search you will find people who have shimmed the seat using different washers to increase the angle. The leather seats in my new 11 are passable -- much better then the cloth seats of a few years ago -- but, they still don't provide any real support.

The 12's have the power seat but I did not see any improvement in the actual design of the seat -- and the greater rearward travel is not coupled with any more movement on the steering wheel. Long legs with short arms is a worst case scenario

 

As I stated earlier....$29K for a PRIUS is OVERPRICED....don't really care if its' a 4 OR 5 !!!!!

 

Rodney Dangerfield (born Jacob Cohen, November 22, 1921 – October 5, 2004)

R.I.P.

 

(Deleted)

 

Ryan, take look at how the front seat mounts are made. A reasonably skilled person could drill out the rivets holding the front piece on, fabricate a simple nearly flat front piece and drop the front of the seat about an inch. That is probably enough to get the uprightness you are looking for. That might (or might not) require modifying the rear mounts a bit to keep them aligned but I can't tell without pulling the plastic covers off of them.

You shouldn't have to start cutting on a new car, but if that's your only objection it's worth considering.

 

Mine is the black GSX-R600 just behind it. Dude standing behind me rode the little Ninja, and with his 15 years of roadracing, he was the best rider on our group rides. We rode on less traveled roads, often small, very twisty, in the local mountains. Good motorcycling roads around here.

 

Sounds like you're hinting that becaue of the way it drives.

So, I guess the Two and Three are also overpriced at $25k and $26.5k repectively, huh? Prices do typically jump a couple grand or so when you dump in 'leather like' seats and upgraded audio system.

Four is laden with options -

Navigation
backup camera
Homelink/autodimming mirror
Smart key/push button start
JBL high end audio system, XM, HD radio
USB / Bluetooth handfree
power driver's Softex seat

A Honda Accord EX-L is about $29k sticker and no nav, no backup cam, no Smart key and gets about half the MPGs. Don't compare Prius to Civic, Corolla, etc... cause I won't be listening. Nothing compares to Prius, there is no exact copy on the planet to date.

 

If you break the connection between the rails and front mount feet, you'd still have to cut down the mount feet and find a way to reattach the rails to them (welding) .....

At that point you'd be 'experimenting' with what may or may not work. The right rear mount can rotate allowing the front to lower, but the left rear mount is in a fixed plane so any pulling down the front will just be bending down and tweaking the left rear mount.

If it doesn't work, you are left with a permanently altered seat frame. It should cost about $500 for a new Toyota seat frame, then you'd have to completely move all the materials (including an airbag which is an explosive device) from the damaged frame over to the new one, costing someone a lot of time. Toyota would not do this job in any way.

If you didn't replace the seat frame, you would not be able to trade the car in, and if you sold the car to private party, you could be sued if your buyer was hurt in an accident.

Fool's game to go modifying factory seat. I set mine aside and modified used Prius seats.

 

Replace the front feet with new fabricated parts and bolt them on while saving the stock feet in case you want to put it back to stock. The rear flat foot could easily be handled by making a couple of wedge pieces. It's not rocket science.

 

Ryan - Have you tried just pushing your back against the entire seat back and letting it support you? That's essentially what I do, and I tend to have the seat back towards more up-right than most other people I know. I've thrown my back out once and tweaked it a few years after that. I've done some 8 hour trips in the car (with breaks every couple hours), and haven't had any back pain from the seats. Try putting your back all the way against the seat back next time and see what happens.