Power seat
electrically-adjustable vehicle seat
A power seat in an automobile is a seat in a passenger compartment that can be adjusted using a button, switch or joystick and a set of small electric motors. Most cars with this feature have controls for the driver's seat only, though almost all luxury cars also have power controls for the front passenger seat.
In addition to fore and aft adjustments, power seats can be raised or lowered and tilted to suit the comfort of the driver and/or passenger. Many power seats allow occupants to adjust the seat lumbar or seatback recline, all at the push of a button or flick of a switch.
Cars which do not have this feature have a lever or bar to provide fore and aft adjustments.
Memory seat
Some cars also have memory adjustments, which can recall (usually) two different adjustments of the seat by pressing a button. The 1981 Cadillac was the first car to offer this feature in its modern version. By the 1990s, these systems began allowing customized settings and adjustments for such conveniences as side mirrors, steering wheel, and lumbar support.
History
Power seats began appearing in automobiles in the late 1940s. Most early seats were fore-aft only, which saved little work.
“Power seat” enters the record as electrically-adjustable vehicle seat. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Power, seat and electrically-adjustable can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Power seat” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Power, seat and electrically-adjustable provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 27, 2023. The linked authority identifier is Q7236609. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Power seat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.