I own a 2006 honda CRV with leather seats, it is my first vehicle with leather. It is only 2 years old & just 13000 miles on it. I notice the leather on the drivers seat is streching & sort of looks a bit loose.
The pass. seat which we use quite a lot looks brand new. I weigh only 165 lbs. & wife about 20 lbs less so it can,t be our weight causing this. Could it be that they just picked a bad piece of leather for this seat? Has anyone had this problem with a leather seated vehicle this new? Do you think I should go after Honda about warranty on this seat.I owned 2 other honda cars with cloth seats & they all looked like new after 5 & 8 years. Thanks in advance. Bill
Leather seats need to be conditioned. Plus, every time you drive, someone is in the driver seat. Every one of my cars has done this. I actually think I am avoiding leather next time.
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I would go after Honda for warranty. Regardless of the weight of the driver and frequency of use, the seat has to be designed to hold up. The grade of leather, the treatment etc is all important. If leather seats need conditioning, it must be specified in the owners manual, and performed by your dealer at specified service intervals. I dont think you would get much from Honda but you can atleast altert them to a problem. Hope this helps.
I condition the leather on my seats once each year, and I have never had a problem with it “loosening” on any of the 4 cars on which I have had leather upholstery.
So, I want to offer a possibility here that you might want to think about, namely:
Did the car come from the factory with leather upholstery, or was it “added” by the dealership?
I can recall looking at a car several years ago that did not have leather upholstery, and I was told by the salesman that they could “add” leather to it for an extra charge. When I inquired about this, I was told that they would send the car to a shop that would put leather covers over the cloth upholstery, using hog clips or something of that nature. I then looked at a car to which they had added leather upholstery, and I determined that this was not a quality method of getting leather upholstery.
So, I would suggest that you take a look at the underside of the seats (this might be easier with the folding rear seats on the CRV) and see if it looks like the leather was put on with hog clips. If the leather upholstery came from the factory, there will not be any hog clips. If you see something like hog clips, that is a good tip-off that this was added by the dealership.
Another method of determining if it came from the factory with leather upholstery is to check the original window sticker (I save them, and hopefully you do the same, for reasons like this) and see if leather upholstery is listed there. If not, then it was an after-market “add-on” done by the dealership.
As with after-market simulated convertible tops, fender mouldings, and other “pimp” accessories installed by dealerships, after-market leather seats just do not stand up and will stretch, since they are not factory quality and they are not really a part of the seat. People frequently pay a lot of money for these dealer-installed options and in almost every case, they look like hell after about three years.
A big problem IMHO is that non-luxury vehicles including Honda & Toyota branded use lower quality leather causes wear/tear to show up quicker. Move up to a real luxury vehicle and the leather feel/quality moves up significantly.
ALL leather seats are put on with hog rings. Cloth seats too. That’s what holds the seat cover to the seat frame. The trouble with this dealer’s install method isn’t the hog rings, it’s that he’s got the leather sliding around over the cloth, which will cause needless wear and shaping problems. The real way to do it is to remove the cloth and replace it WITH the leather.
Just for the sake of accuracy, I looked again at the underside of my leather seats and there are no visible hog rings. It appears that the leather is stitched to something under the leather. Now, maybe underneath all of this stuff are some hog rings, but there is nothing visible except for a lot of very nice neat stitching.
What I was referring to was visible hog rings that are right at the edge where the side of the upholstery meets the seat frame. They were present on the “add-on” leather that I observed, but this is not the way that my seats are constructed.
You are right VDCdriver. SOME are, but ALL are not attached with hog rings