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Next Gen Seat Upgrade available, not a good deal.

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I dilly dallied getting next gen seats or not, and eventually decided to get them. And boy am I glad I did. They look better, they feel better, and I would have been really mad to learn that getting them afterwardsw ould have cost $7000 instead of $750 upcharge (vs. old gen leather).
 
Has anyone looked at OEM prices for seats in other cars? My Infiniti seats are over $6000 dollars each. And that doesn't include a lot of the mounting hardware or headrests...

I was about to say this exact same thing. I wanted to swap out my front seats on a G37 coupe for the ones with heated and cooled climate control. $6k each!

Then I start thinking about an arm chair in my living room. A nice leather one is usually 1-2k and that doesn't include airbags, heated seat cushions, or motor controls.
 
Edit: Looking at the below video, it looks like Tesla has side curtain airbags. None in the bolster.

TESLA Model S Crash Test 5/5 Stars Tesla Commercial Tesla NCAP Rating CARJAM TV HD 4K Car Video 2015 - YouTube

Not even God knows whether there are airbags in Tesla front seats.


I consider the presence of airbags in the front seats to be a quantum superposition:

The seat bags for sure contain airbags. 100% confirmed and re-confirmed by some people in Tesla (not all).

Unless you look right at where the airbags are supposed to be, in which case they were never there in the first place...
 
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I have been told that the next gen seat is not electronically compatible with the earlier generation. So, it is not just the seats being bolted in. There is other work necessary as well to integrate them.

I believe you were probably misinformed.

Many P85D owners, including me, had our cars delivered without Next Gen seats, and then had the Next Gen seats swapped in later. I watched much of it done in my garage, and there weren't electronic changes. It was a pretty quick process.

Also, I asked the tech what Tesla would be doing with the old seats. I can't say whether or not his answer is correct, but he said, basically, that the seats are sent back to the manufacturer where the covering is removed so that the inner part of the seat may be used again. I imagine they do some stuff to the inner seat, to make it "as good as new" before reusing it. Again, this assumes the information I received from the tech was accurate. It may not have been.
 
Your car was always slated to receive the next gen seat, so the old gen was a stop gap. Thus, the electronics/ harness/ software, whatever, may have all been present but just turned off. I am not saying what I was told is gospel, but it was a senior tech who has done work on my car previously and he sure knew what he was doing the first time around!
 
I believe you were probably misinformed.

Many P85D owners, including me, had our cars delivered without Next Gen seats, and then had the Next Gen seats swapped in later. I watched much of it done in my garage, and there weren't electronic changes. It was a pretty quick process.

It is my understanding from my local Service Manager that there is some kind of firmware update when the next-gen seats are installed due to the different air bags/different seat position, to adjust deployment. Not quite 'plug and play'...
 
The Sydney service centre knows nothing about next gen seats being available for retrofit. I asked today. Also, if airbags are installed in the side bolsters, there is usually a label sewn into the seam saying so. There is no such label on my original seats, BUT there is a label on the Recaro next gen seat, which I saw this morning.
 
Has the service center given you an idea of when the retrofit might become available? I took delivery of my MS in September of 2013. Seats back then were really hard. Apparently they made some adjustments to the springs on the newer cars sometime in 2014 and for a short period of time the service centers were implementing a fix for customers unhappy with their seats. Love everything about my MS except the seats. Wondering if anyone else who bought an earlier model has the same thoughts? If the retrofit isn't coming soon or is too pricey, does anyone have any suggestions for cushions that make seats a little plusher, but don't look awful? Any recommendations much appreciated.