Porsche shows off 3D-printed seats with plans to custom-fit them to your body

Porsche continues to dig into 3D printing technology, and this time it’s all about seats. The German sports car (and SUV) company just revealed what it calls a “3D-printed bodyform full-bucket seat.”

Our favorite part of this new seat is Porsche’s ability to customize it for a specific customer. Those who order the seat will be able to choose between three firmness levels: soft, medium and hard. Porsche uses its 3D printing tech to partly construct the central section of the seat to attain these different levels of comfort. 

As of right now, Porsche still considers this seat a concept study. However, it has explicit plans to bring it to customers via Porsche Tequipment in the near future. For 2020, Porsche is only making 40 driver’s seats, and they’ll go in 911s and 718s. All of them will be considered prototype seats, only to be used on racetracks in Europe with a six-point harness. After Porsche receives feedback from these customers, it’ll expand the seat availability to Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur in mid-2021. Various colors will be made available at this point, too. In the long-term, Porsche hopes this tech leads them down the path of even greater customization for its customers. We’re talking seats molded and designed for a specific person’s body shape and contour, much like seats for some motorsports are sculpted to fit the specific driver.

“With the ‘3D-printed bodyform full-bucket seat’, we’re once again giving series-production customers the opportunity to experience technology carried over from motor sports,” says Michael Steiner, member of the executive board for research and development at Porsche.

That opens an entirely new can of worms for the used market, though. If the second, third or forth owner needs to get a new seat to properly drive the car, it’s doable, but it does add a considerable expense and level of complexity to the purchase of a used car. However, it also sounds like an option box we would absolutely want to check when configuring our new Porsche. The appearance of the concept study seat is awesome — we hope the “windows” to the internal red lattice structure make it to production. As of now, there is no price, but expect the 3D-printed seat to be Porsche expensive.