Redesigning Car Seats

Today's idea might seem a bit silly at first read. But give it a chance and think about it.

Why in the world are car seats built in a manner similar to couches?

Couches are both heavy and bulky.

Now I must admit that I had been impressed with the way that seats in some modern vans can fold into the floors. But they are still taking up a fair bit of space in those compartments.

My proposal is to make car seats more like folding chairs.

If you own a van, go out and remove your seats. Then drop some folding chairs in there. You might make a few observations. The could easily be divided into a pros and cons.

Pros:
1) There is more leg room.
2) They fold up easier and take less space.

Cons:
1) It seems pretty dangerous.
2) It is less comfortable.

First to explain the pros. Folding chairs have a lot less structural material to take up space: less cross beams, less springs, and less foam (ultimately I think it is the foam padding that takes up the most space). This opens up more feet for peoples legs, or to just tuck 'cargo' underneath. In the event you need to put something large in your car, these seats fold up to a very small space compared to the giant car seats that you currently used. The size of these things means they could even be used in sedans.

There is actually one other pro I didn't mention. These seats would be easier to clean. Couches (and seats by extension) have nooks and crannies thats hard to vacuum. And getting underneath them can be equally as hard.I leave it to the reader to imagine how easy it is to clean the floor of your car if all the seats fold up.

But what about the cons? First I will address the comfort issue. I have sat in some pretty comfortable folding chairs. Now I am not talking about folding metal chairs, but some of chairs are these fabric affairs that are actually pretty comfortable. Some of them even have cup holders. Then there is no reason the angle of the back could not be adjustable. The amount of tension in the fabric could even be adjustable to change the stiffness. That's not something you can do with car seats. Ultimately it is just my opinion but I feel that these chairs can be just as comfortable as car seats.

Now there might be an issue with suspension. I imagine the undercarriage of car seats help them dampen vibrations in the car and deal with bumpy roads (if not someone should look into this). Well there are various methods in which the fabric tension in the chairs could be dynamically adjusted to achieve this affect.

So what about safety. Obviously a method would need to be designed to secure these chairs to the floor. This could make it 'safe' during normal driving conditions. But what about accidents. In a bad accident the structural integrity of the cars fame is compromised. I imagine that the seats integrity would provide some additional safety. So obviously we would want to make our seats out of some strong material. Likewise, pretty much anywhere you already have supports on your seat, you could add additional supports parallel without significantly increasing the size. In fact, I could imagine that in certain accidents this system could potentially be safer. Adjusting the tension in the fabric (and thus stiffness of the seat) when an accident is detected could help in certain situations.

Ultimately I will admit that making this and ensuring passenger safety would require a lot of testing and good old fashioned trial and error.

Now there may be one final objection. Say you have duck-taped a bunch of folding chairs to your car. It looks pretty tacky. Few people would want to use this if it looks ugly. Well thats simply a matter of designing the chairs to match the interior. Put some sleek curves into the frames and add some plastic casing to hide ugly parts. People would still be resistant to adopt something so 'new' but that's a problem for the marketing department.