Modern Car Seats Are Losing Their Sex Appeal For Owners

For baby boomers and their parents, the American love affair with cars was at least in part about love affairs in cars. Whether driving hip to hip down the highway or making out in the back seat, millions of Americans went looking for love in Fords and Chevys.

But now the car seat that helped make much of that possible, the big bench seat that sprawled like manifest destiny from one door to the other, is fast disappearing. While three-quarters of all new cars in the early 1970s still had them, only 5 percent did last year.

This year there are almost none among the hundreds of models that the world’s automakers are displaying at shows across the country.

Disappearing with the bench seat is America’s pastime of steaming up the windows. Its passing has not gone unnoticed.

David L. Lewis, an auto industry historian at the University of Michigan who has been studying sex and cars since the late 1950s, measured the interiors of every model at Detroit’s auto show to determine their suitability - and found them too cramped.

Lewis said there were several reasons that his specialty is becoming a matter more of historical interest: Crime has made young couples nervous about old-fashioned lovers’ lanes. Sex at home has become much easier for unsupervised teenagers as their mothers, by the millions, have taken jobs. And federal safety regulations, particularly seat-belt requirements, have made seats much less, well, accommodating.

Young men who lusted after fast cars began to face a dilemma in models like the 1964 Ford Mustang and the 1967 Chevrolet Camaro, which came only with bucket seats.

“It was sort of cool to have bucket seats, but it was not cool for the inconvenience it created,” recalled one auto industry official, who insisted on anonymity because he has a 14-year-old daughter.

These days, even more rear seats are molded for the contours of two adults sitting upright, with an uncomfortable ridge between them. Auto executives worry about being sued by a passenger injured while sitting on a bench seat where air bags may provide less protection or a shoulder belt is not available.

In countries where safety regulations are less stringent and teenagers more closely supervised, lust is not yet lost. Honda introduced in Japan last November the new SMX minivan, in which all three rows of seats fold flat to make a large bed. The automaker has no plans to sell it in the United States.

In the 1950s Nash Motors sold a car with front seats that folded back to form a bed. Like Honda with the SMX, Nash said the car was for campers. But “when a woman was picked up in a Nash, she usually cringed,” said John P. Wolkonowicz, an auto consultant.

Bedlike designs may never again be sold here. “You don’t want the driver accidentally pulling a lever and being lowered to a level where he can’t see out to drive,” said Richard L. Beck, a seat designer for Ford.

Some ads still appeal to people who remember the Nash era. Cadillac, for example, has a television ad for the DeVille that briefly shows a gray-haired man sitting in the back seat and closes with a singer crooning about “making whoopie.”

“I’ve never heard anyone say you’re consciously designing a platform for sex,” said Jerry Hirshberg, the president of Nissan’s North American design center in San Diego. Still, he added: “I’ve wondered if part of the appeal of pickups and minivans is you have a big flat area.”

Perhaps that’s what President Clinton was hinting at when he mentioned a few years ago, provoking weeks of speculation, that he once lined the flatbed of an El Camino with Astroturf. “You don’t want to know why, but I did,” he added with a sly grin. Clinton later said he was merely hauling luggage.

Not everyone is deterred by design problems. Citing “my misspent youth in Europe,” Robert Lutz, the former Marine pilot who is now Chrysler’s vice chairman, said one trick involved tilting the front passenger seat back and removing the headrest.

“If there’s a chance of discovery, at least you’re in the front seat,” he said.

With a rising percentage of front-seat passengers wearing seat belts with shoulder straps, few Americans are even able to put their arms around each other as they drive. “It just gave you a warm feeling when you saw couples just hip to hip,” said Lewis. “Now the best that couples can do is hold hands.”