Aftermarket seats on Mk7 Fiesta - not as straight forward
Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2011 11:27 am
Good Morning All
If you're planning on installing aftermarket seats to your mk7 Fiesta theres a couple of things you need to be wary of that I only found out about AFTER buying my seats.
1. Airbag sensor on the underside of the seat is hard wired into the same plug that has wires for seat belt pretensioner and seat belt warning bleep, this means any airbag resistor kit you buy, needs to be hard wired into the existing plus by a QUALIFIED auto electrician, sadly Ford haven't produced a airbag resistor plug that fits straight on. I was also told that messing about with airbag sensors can possibly cause the other airbags in the car to malfunction - not sure how true this is but when it comes to car safety this is a risk I didn't want to take.
2. When you buy an aftermarket seat you need to not only buy a sub-frame but also a set of runners. The runners on the factory seats are welded onto seat frame so these can't be taken off. sub-frames/runners can potentially be very expensive, for example Recaro quoted me £600 for a set of sub-frames and runners, I know brands such as Sparco are a lot cheaper.
I decided to sell the aftermarket seats that I had bought a few weeks ago, the cost of subframes/runners and potential electrical work was to much and I can't justify spending this amount.
Any way, good luck if you do decideto change your seats, it would be interesting to find out if Recaro seats that comes in the Focus RS will fit straight onto a mk7 Fiesta, I'm guessing the plug on the underside of the seat is the same throughout all the Ford range - any ideas?
Just for info I've added a couple of pics of the plug that sits on the underside of the mk7 Fiesta seat.
Thank you
If you're planning on installing aftermarket seats to your mk7 Fiesta theres a couple of things you need to be wary of that I only found out about AFTER buying my seats.
1. Airbag sensor on the underside of the seat is hard wired into the same plug that has wires for seat belt pretensioner and seat belt warning bleep, this means any airbag resistor kit you buy, needs to be hard wired into the existing plus by a QUALIFIED auto electrician, sadly Ford haven't produced a airbag resistor plug that fits straight on. I was also told that messing about with airbag sensors can possibly cause the other airbags in the car to malfunction - not sure how true this is but when it comes to car safety this is a risk I didn't want to take.
2. When you buy an aftermarket seat you need to not only buy a sub-frame but also a set of runners. The runners on the factory seats are welded onto seat frame so these can't be taken off. sub-frames/runners can potentially be very expensive, for example Recaro quoted me £600 for a set of sub-frames and runners, I know brands such as Sparco are a lot cheaper.
I decided to sell the aftermarket seats that I had bought a few weeks ago, the cost of subframes/runners and potential electrical work was to much and I can't justify spending this amount.
Any way, good luck if you do decideto change your seats, it would be interesting to find out if Recaro seats that comes in the Focus RS will fit straight onto a mk7 Fiesta, I'm guessing the plug on the underside of the seat is the same throughout all the Ford range - any ideas?
Just for info I've added a couple of pics of the plug that sits on the underside of the mk7 Fiesta seat.
Thank you
