Can’t adjust the seat properly. Passengers slide more easily when cornering. More material required for upholstery and padding.
As someone who has had both, bucket seats are way better than bench seats.
The bucket seats have all that material and padding down each side so I don’t think that point stands.
Bench seats have material and padding all across the middle of the whole car…
And dogs at least can do okay with bucket seats. I drove an Oldsmobile Silhouette ^(the Cadillac of minivans!)^ for years, and my dog was just tall enough that he could sit between the driver and passenger seats and look out the front windshield. He was at the perfect height for head scritches while I drove down the highway.
I remember when he got a bit too hefty to sit there comfortably. The automatic seat adjustment controls were on the right side of the driver seat and one time I suddenly found myself being pushed into the steering wheel at a stop light. His jelly rolls had started pressing in on the little joystick.
I miss that dog. The van was just okay.
I miss my Buick. Thing was like a couch in the front.
“Ah don’t wear a seatbelt because muh sisters cousins friends uncles neighbors mechanics grandaddys brother died while he was wearing a seatbelt and couldn’t get out of the vehicle in time to avoid the freight train that he was too blind and deaf to see or hear coming.”
Fwiw, there’s seatbelts in that image. If you wanted to sit closer, you could cross the right belt over and buckle it into the left buckle, and buckle the left belt into the right one. You could use the same method to secure a 3rd person in the middle. As long as nobody’s too fat.
Stickshifts and safetybelts, bucketseats have all got to go, when we’re driving in my car, they make my baby feel so far
I NEED. YOU HERE WITH ME. NOT WAY OVER IN A BUCKET SEAT.
I love CAKE, definitely my favorite band. Did you know they give out tree saplings at their concerts?
Cake is awesome. I heard about the tree saplings.
…and now I have that song stuck in my head.
What song is it?
Stickshifts and Safety Belts by Cake.
That’s certainly a song of all time
Yeah because that engineers cute girl and dog probably died in a T bone accident.
It’s all good until safety is a consideration
This exactly.
Bench seats are great for hanging out with afore mentioned dog and/or girl.
Bench seats are super shitty in any sort of side impact collision. There’s nothing keeping you in place except your safety belt.We rented a van last year and only the front seats were bucket seats, the backseat of our car is a bench seat too. In both cases they’re not smooth across the back anymore like the one in the picture, all modern bench seats have divots too.
Then why is the middle seat the safest car seat?
If you mean the middle rear, probably because there’s nothing in front of you. It may be the safest overall, not necessarily the safest in a side impact.
I mean, isn’t that what the seat belt is for? I can’t imagine the typical front seat in a modern car keeping you put in a collision either. They’re definitely shaped comfort-first, and at best keep you from jostling around on uneven roads.
I think they’re talking about sideways motion. Seat belts do their big part but the seat can stop you from going off one side when the belt presses you into it.
It’s one of the benefits of a bucket seat, and you’ll note front seats have a bucket shape both on the back and the bottom. This does a LOT to keep a human in place, especially if the seatbelt is holding the human down into the bucket. Lots of surface area on the side of the leg and torso for the bucket shape. OTOH with a bench seat there’s nothing at all keeping the human in place, there’s just the 3 places where the strap crosses the human and those don’t do very much. Seat belts are designed to keep you down in the seat.
Most passenger cars don’t really have bucket seats. Bucket seats like in race cars have hard, deep structural sides, whereas in passenger cars they’re just soft pillows in a very shallow bucket shape. This is obviously because getting in and out of an actual bucket seat is difficult and consumers don’t like it. Because the pillows are soft, they’re not going to stop you from sliding out in an impact.
I imagine the vaguely bucket shape of modern passenger cars has basically nothing to do with safety, at least not in the “stops you from flying sideways out of your seat” sense, and is mostly just a comfort thing.
Those are both bucket seats, just to different degrees.
Imagine a camera placed where the spine or leg is looking at the side of the seat. Look at how much exposed surface area faces the camera. Let’s call that surface area the ‘side restraint component’. (IE, if the side panel comes ‘up’ out of the seat 2", and extends out 4", the side restraint component is 2").
On a seat belt, you’ve got about 2" x 4" surface area on each side. So 8 square inches on each side. That’s all a bench seat gives you.
On that car seat you’ve got about 2.5" x 8" on the back, plus an average of let’s call it 2.5" x 4" on the seat. So that’s about 30 square inches on each side.
On the racing seat you’ve got about 14" x 20", but cut in half as a triangle, and let’s say the shoulder bit fills in the missing part by the belt opening. So call that 140 square inches per side.
The car seat may be designed for comfort, but the side bolsters do have a restraint effect.
Having been in accidents in both a bench seat and regular car seat. I can say the car seat did a much better job of keeping my ass in place. Though having the center console to brace against may also have played a part in that.
And yet I find them uncomfortable as hell! For long drives anyway. The headrest bends your head forward, so then you’re forced to recline the seat to counteract it. Even your arms go a bit forward due to the bucket shape. I get the safety reasons, just can’t stand the bad posture.
Cute girls > Safety
This is a fundamental law of nature I believe.
We are literally programmed (via neurochemistry) to have reduced concerns about safety in the presence of cute girls. A cute girl literally has more effect on ur brain chemistry than some drugs.
Inject cute girls and boys directly into my veins
Add a fold-down console that locks into place safely in the middle.
Best of both worlds.I have never met a country boy who’s first concern was safety.
Safety goes out the window when you realize that hiway blowjobs are a thing.
The stick is on the column, you could still put seat belts on these just like back bench seats currently. Folding armrests as well. These already slide back/forth for the driver to reach the pedals.
Not a fan of bench seats, but I can’t argue here - this is pretty solid logic. And a solid bassline in that Cake song about them too.
cake felt so strongly about it that they wrote a song
Came here to say the same.
Had a Chevy S10 when i was in high school, my girlfriend loved it lol
my first vehicle was an '84 s10 and i miss it every day
That and killing people
Boooo, nerd.
How do bench seats kill people?
Distractions from all the cute girls and good dogs probably.
They often didn’t have head rests, so whiplash. They also came from a time when shoulder belts weren’t common and seat belts in general were more of a suggestion.
And then there were the days when parents would stuff too many kids into the front of a single cab with a bench seat and put us 2 to a seat belt, and / or one kid on the lap of the driver. But those were also the days of the rear facing seat in the station wagon. I also remember my scout leader packing a group of us into the bed of a pickup, shit was scary but so much fun.
Some do, but at least with my 01 Toyota Tacoma it has a bench seat with headrests and full seat belts, though I guess any hypothetical poor bastard who gets the middle bitch seat is fucked.
They’re much more unsafe than bucket seats. Someone up above in the thread details it more.
In college our basement had the bench seat from a passenger van in it. Easily our best piece of furniture.
I never knew what I was missing until I got an f150. Good lord the bench seat is so comfortable and convenient.
An old bench seat f150 was what I learned to drive on as a teen. I miss it.
Me too! Mine was a five speed with an in-line six cylinder, formally owned by a pipe smoker so it had a very distinct smell.
As an engineer I agree. Bring them back.
The cute girls and dogs were there all along, comrade.
