Scheel-man into your Tacoma, new member intro

Hello folks, we are new to the TacomaWorld forum but been around Tacoma's for many years. We've been developing with our own 2018 Cement Tacoma TRD. Last year scheel-mann came to us to engineer a solution to be able to replace a Tacoma owner's old seat with a scheel-mann seat. Basically the issues were with airbags, seat belt sensors and occupancy sensors that needed to be worked with in order to get a safe replacement system going.

Well here we are a year later and we have the seating system complete for Gen 2 and Gen3 Tacomas (ok FJ Cruisers as well) and felt it was good a time as any to start being part of the Tacoma community.

We have solved the issue of the airbag by developing our own plug-in airbag proxy. This simply tells the SRS system that the system is still functioning correctly despite missing an airbag (because you removed your OEM seat for an aftermarket). Then we built in the existing Tacoma seat belt and sensor. And finally we completely redesigned the passenger side load-cell setup with a new design but keeping the sensors in play. We now have a setup that keeps everything working correctly without making the Tacoma unhappy. Shipping starts today.

www.tolerance-stack.com

 

To replace OEM manual seat with airbag, with aftermarket manual seat without airbag? That's a lot of liability without much benefit.

 

There are a LOT of crappy seats that need to be replaced or owners just want to replace. Every single replacement aftermarket seat will always be sans airbag. And yet there are thousands of seats that get replaced...for the benefit of a much more comfortable seat that doesn't hurt your back and will be a joy to sit in for ridiculously long drives.

 

Not sure what qualifies as "crappy seats" in the case of 3rd gen Tacomas, haven't seen many owners willing to spend $2-3 thousands to replace their seats.

Quality of the seats themselves is not the issue, most of the complains I saw are directed to the seating position, which solved by $100 Seatjackers in few minutes without losing the seat airbags.

If I were to spend that kind of money for a seat, it'd better be a powered, which also sits lower than the manual.

Not saying your seats ain't nice, just there is a big difference between what people want, and what people are willing to pay.

 

Fact is that scheel-mann USA was getting 100s of requests for specifically the 3rd Gen. Considering Toyota pumped out 225k trucks a year for ten years, you'd better believe there are folks ready to throw the stock seat out.

Quality of the seats actually is the issue or else we wouldn't be bothering doing all the engineering. We've heard directly from a healthy batch of folks wanting replacement seats.

Actually we have been getting more folks wanting to get rid of their powered seats and replace with a full manual option. I would not have believed it if we weren't seeing so much if it. And by the way, these are not our seats. We just happen to develop the mechanical solutions t make scheel-mann's seats work. Scheel-mann is its own company.

 

That’s awesome!!
Plug and play with no airbag lights

 

That was the whole idea from the beginning, along with making sure we didn't raise the overall seat height but still adding in some rake to eliminate the need for the jacker thing. Plus the only other seat mounting option is woefully inadequate.

 

$6,034 for driver and passenger seat packages including shipping

Do you have a video demonstrating how these are better than OEM?

 

Correct. 2k-ish per seat and bracketry runs about $1500 for both sides. Driver side is pretty basic, but passenger side is a mess to get to work around the load-cells and SRS system.

I am sure scheel-mann may have something but we do not make the seats, just the seat adapters. I wi admit I didn't think the seats were all that the first time we saw them. But since having one to seat test over the past year we are all converts.

 

Forget corbeau, sparco, etc. Scheel-mann is top shelf stuff. On par if not better than Recaro.

 

I have seen daily driver classic BMWs sporting these seats.
A couple of Tacomas on this forum have them as well.

 

Indeed... Scheel and scheel-mann are very popular among the BMW E9 CS Coupe crowd.

 

There is an around the world tacoma that has them too.

 

That's been our observation

 

We saw that. Seems like a whole lot of effort for a one-off.

 

Installed on the driver side on our test Tacoma, lot of miles on this setup.

 

Any YT video on installation?

 

That is next on the itinerary. We kept making small tweaks to the final product that it kept pushing back both photography and potential video work. But for sure it will be coming. The instructions for both sides are being finalized now, then video.

 

My parents old (now, mine) 2010 tacoma has terrible seats. The 3rd gen driver seat is significsntly better. If they were as bad, I'd be figuring out a way to install a 3rd gen 4runner seat in the drivers position, at least.

Good to see some options out there. I have no experience (ass time) in a scheels seat, but I have driven/ridden in recaro's. Very nice compared to an OEM offering. I'm probably not in your target market, but good to see someones solved the airbag issue at least. Are there plans to sell the airbag delete module for the drivers seat separately from the mounts?