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Retrofitting Skoda Superb electric seats on my Volkswagen Polo

27th March 2025, 17:00 by R Patil

Thanks to my friend Prerak, I got the itch of retrofitting Superb electric seats in the Polo. I must say, it is his efforts that made the Polo electric seat retrofit a very popular affair in the Indian market

BHPian fluidicjoy recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

The seats on the last lot of the Polo sold in India were pretty terrible, especially the ones on the Highline+ TSI AT. The foam was very average, and I was noticing some lower back pain due to inadequate support from the seats. I was exploring options to make them comfier, but something else was on the horizon.

Thanks to my friend Prerak, I got the itch of retrofitting Superb electric seats in the Polo. I must say, it is his efforts that made the Polo electric seat retrofit a very popular affair in the Indian market. These seats were lying idle at scrapyards for years, but thanks to his videos, they started flying off the shelf and became very much in demand. Additionally, he spent a lot of time refining the fit and finish of this retrofit, and even fabricated reliable mountings for installing these seats in the Polo Vento PQ25 platform. I'll leave a link to his video in the end.

He was kind enough to find me a pair of decent seats in Chandigarh from a scrap parts dealer and had them shipped to me. All of this happened while I was in the US, and he sent the seats to The Mechanix Automotive, where I'd usually work on cars. The seats reached before I landed in India, and were shipped by truck from Chandigarh.

The head-rests were shipped to me at home, and I put them on the living room for a while.

We spent quite some time to refurbish the seats, including repairing corroded wiring contacts, soldering broken wires. Everything was being done properly, since it was a retrofit that would stay in for a long time.

Seat Plates
The Polo and Vento platform have smaller seat-rails compared to the PQ35 Jetta, Laura and the elder sibling Superb. So the Superb seats weren't a straight mechanical swap in the Polo and might have either needed drilling in the chassis, or some mechanical fixtures to install in the Polo. Prerak spent a lot of time to perfect these Seat plates and sent me a set of these adapters. I highly recommend buying these adapters from him if you want to do a similar project. In fact, Prerak had flown in to help me install these seats. That was when I got to meet him in person for the first time, but more on that later.

Huge shoutout to Prerak, and Mohseef, Hrithik from The Mechanix Automotive for being a great help for the summer projects we performed on the Polo.

I couldn't have completed a lot of the planned tasks without their enthusiasm. Today, both of them help run the show at The Mechanix Automotive, where they tune, build and maintain a lot of fancy cars. Here's a look at the bottom-side of the stock-seats. The last lot of the Polo had seat contact detection sensors on the Passenger side, a very nice addition.

However, once everything was put back in, we realized there was something wrong with the back-rest motor on the passenger side, and so I decided to revert back to my stock seats, until I figured out the issue. So eventually, the electric seats were brought home for some more exploration, and little did I know that they'd spend the entire summer at home, with nobody sitting on them.

Eventually, I decided to cut my loses and sold the seats at a small loss, but on the flip-side, the seats are in Hrithik's Vento, so I'm glad they finally found a home