BMW Seat Install

First posted this in the forum "What Have You Done to Your Tacoma Today", but thought someone might find benefit if I created a new thread.

Finally finished the install of my BMW seats. I started this project with a set of 2011 BMW 328i seats from a salvage yard. One of the key determining factors for selecting these seats was that the width of the rails was nearly a perfect match to the factory ones. I made sure to get the section of wiring that goes from the floor to the seat. My biggest mistake was selecting a seat with memory functions for the driver. I would hate to guess the number of hours I spent on researching the wiring to get full function of the six way power, lumbar support, and heat. Ultimately, I had to basically lobotomize the driver seat, and replace all of the wiring and switch with those from another passenger seat. This was due to the driver switch being tied back to the central computer system, as part of the memory functions. So I had to purchase the wiring harness and a switch for a passenger seat from eBay. Hopefully, I will have luck selling the ones that I pulled from the seat. Spent a couple of evenings pulling and moving pins in the various connectors to get proper function.

I used different mounting methods for the rails on each seat. On the passenger (the first that I did), I made feet that matched perfectly with the factory Toyota feet (didn't really want to cut the ones off my original seats), and welded them to the tracks of the BMW seats. This was a messy way, required removing the carpet (but I did take advantage and applied Frost King to lower the amount of road noise). For the driver side, I instead made brackets and bolted them to the floor using the factory holes, and then bolted the tracks to the brackets. Much more straight forward, and it allowed me to place the seat at the lowest possible level. It still feels like you are riding quite a bit "higher in the saddle". The real issue is that it is impossible to make the front of the seat any lower. *Edit: It may be possible to get the seats somewhat lower by removing the double panel that goes across the floor pan at the front edge, but this will remove the factory bolt locations. You would have to bolt straight down through the floor.

But they are comfy, and the heat will feel good come winter time here in upstate NY.

Things that I learned along the way:

• Any seat selected needs to be very short from the rail to the seat. Otherwise you will be sitting too high.
• Select seats with a simple wiring system, primarily without memory are preferable.
• Fabricated brackets separate from the seat are better

If anyone has questions, don't hesitate to ask. My council would be to go into this sort of a swap with caution. The physical swap is not all that bad, but if you want to go with all the power options you may be in store for a lot of time invested.

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Looks good, thanks for the write-up!

 

I'm in the same boat as you. I bought 2001 Lexus ES300 power seats to put into my truck - which have memory adjustments and heated seats. I'll agree with you the memory adjustment is a huge PITA to get to work. I still haven't gotten mine to work, but the motorized adjustments work fine without them. There's like 3-4 wires that connect to the Lexus ES300 ECU or body harness that need to be grounded, powered, etc that deal with just the memory adjustment for god knows what reason. (One of the wires goes to the power mirror computer?) The harness coming out of the driver's seat has something like 20 goddamn wires.



I wanted to keep my original Tacoma sliding mechanism intact so what I did was buy some 60/40 seats from the yard, grinded it enough to where I could weld some angle iron, and my plan is to weld the Lexus seats on top of that. I haven't actually welded the Lexus seats to the Tacoma rails yet on the account that I ran out of shielding gas for my MIG welder. I'm afraid it'll sit too high on account of the rail on top of rail thing. I absolutely need the sliders since I have an extended cab and passengers will never be able to get in the back without it.

I did actually want some kind of seat from a German car, and I searched through about 200-300 different BMW's, Mercedeses, Audis, etc. and I found that all of them were really damn uncomfortable and stiff. I was about to get some leather Subaru seats but then I came across the ES300 seats. They're memory foam and like, incredibly comfortable. It's nice to have Toyota manufactured parts in a Toyota vehicle, so I couldn't say no. The plushness of the cushions was nothing I found in any other car (besides like, 1970's era Cadillacs)





tl;dr - for the love of god don't buy power seats just swap in mechanical seats

Could you elaborate on how you mounted them to the cab? Curious to see the bracket you made.

 

nice write up. i've been looking for seats for months. Sitting high is a big concern for me. My regular cab leaves no room and being 6"1 i can't add any height to the seats

 

I feel ya, at 6'3" I need to find some shorter seats for my truck as well.

The BMW seats look nice, op!

 

If you have all of the movements functioning, I would say scr** the memory function!! I wish I had been so lucky to just have the motion. Actually, I did have the motion functions for a few seconds, as long as I was moving stuff, but once I stopped adjusting, it would lock up and not come back on until you had disconnected stuff. Apparently, it was trying to save the settings for the memory, and when it didn't have signal from the "brains", it just shut down.

I heated and bent 1/8 bar stock for the two front brackets, copying the factory profile. Here is the front bracket.

Here is a box bracket I made from two short pieces of 2 inch angle iron, after shortening two of the sides to 1 3/4. The one next to the tunnel was 2 3/4, so I added stock to that one, after creating the box. (Just working with what I had lying around, which wasn't much!!)

Lastly, here are the taller brackets that were factory height, that I chose to replace with the boxed ones. They match what was used on passenger side, which were welded to the BMW rails.

If I were to start over, I would remove the bump up in the floor pan (see first picture above), where the front stock brackets mount. This is actually a double layer in the floor, with a void of probably an inch or more. I would remove that upper layer, all the way from the door sill to the tunnel, which would allow the front of the seat to be that much lower. If I were concerned with the strength of the cab floor (which I don't believe I would be), you could always bolt a piece of strap underneath. In the case of the BMW seats, I could bolt them to the floor, using the bolt holes in their rails. This should give them much better range of usable motion. As mine sit today, I doubt that anyone will ever need to tilt the front of the set up. and that is why I didn't make the rear brackets any shorter, though I could have. If I get industrious at some future point, I may go back and remove that hump and lower mine down. Right now, I am tired of working on them. LOL

Hope this helps!!!