Porsche to 3D print custom seats

Body-formed seats have been de rigueur for top-flight racing drivers for years, and now Porsche wants to bring them to its customers.

The company that, along with Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz, stretched the options lists of its cars to impossibly long reams of paper is about to add one more very expensive line at the bottom.

The sportscar company has unveiled what it calls its 3D-Printed Bodyform Full-Bucket Seat.

While it’s considered a concept study at Porsche at the moment, it plans to bring it to market through its accessories arm.

“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,” Porsche’s board member for Research and Development Michael Steiner said.

Porsche is only making 40 of the seats this year for European 911 and 718 customers and they’ll all be racetrack-only prototypes, to be used exclusively with six-point harnesses.

It will allow Porsche’s customers to choose between soft, medium and hard levels of seat firmness thanks to 3D printing the centre section of the seats.

It will use its customers as test pilots by taking their feedback and shifting the seat technology across to its Exclusive area towards the second half of next year.

It’s a step in a direction towards the personally moulded seats Porsche wants to deliver for its customers, to fit individual body contours and pointy parts.