Has anyone here swapped out the factory seats with something aftermarket? I personally find the front seats uncomfortable and want to swap them out, as well as the rear bench, with sport/bucket seats. The "Enco Gladiator" has a pretty cool interior, using 4 GT3 RS seats, so I want to replicate that. Only concern I have, is that the front seats have airbags in them. If the wires that plug into the seat are left disconnected for the new seats, will that cause any warnings or air bag problems?

 

If you disconnect the plugs you will have warnings. It is possible, they did it on the Gladiator!
You would need some sort of emulator plugged in to trick the system so that it can still perform self-diagnostics and see that the airbag is in place and functional. If you look in the FSM it notes a ton of precautionary items you may never think of. This is an area where you really need to be cautious. Maybe you could look to the 996 community as apparently its possible to use a 2.5 ohm resistor to fool the system. However, the Cayenne may not be the same and you would probably need to establish some resistance values for your current airbags before proceeding. I would suggest not disconnecting any of the plugs until you have read the airbag section in the fsm.

 

Those are some nice seats. Fabricating the seat brackets and fooling the side airbags will be an issue. Bigger issue would be getting in and out of an SUV with a bucket sports seat. Still looks very good though.

 

The airbag sensor will be tricky, but doable. With either a PIWIS or Durametric, you can access the airbag control module. From there, in theory, you can change the coding to remove the airbag functionality. However, I cannot say with what level of granularity.

From an application point of view, 4 bucket seats in a Cayenne would make sense on a Nurburgring taxis (similar to M5, Panamera). I doubt anyone would really perform this on a street-only Cayenne.

 

I'm more of a form over function kind of guy but getting in/out shouldn't be much harder. And I'm still in high school so I don't have a family I need to tow around where practicality would be an issue. Making brackets won't be much of an issue since I can just weld something up and the floor under the seats is flat. Reprogramming with a durametric sounds like it should work, but I also like the idea of using a resistor. If I get the resistance of the air bags, using a resistor to close the circuit should trick the system into thinking nothing is disconnected.