99firehawk

soft leather is very fragile when your taking **** apart its so easy to damage , my bad day is having to pull a dash out of a car with soft leather

AndyK

I guess to me a Porsche should have hard, racing type seats. Soft and supple isn't Porsche (IMHO).

bigmac

The supple leather in my 90 looks like new with 45K miles.

lanny

bigmac-that is a nice 928 you got there- love the color... I have the supple leather in my 99 996 with 30k but I swear that they feel no different than my boxster did with the base seat. Only the back seats have that ruffled look already now- the fronts look like base seats for the most part anyway. Not sure I would spend the dough if I ordered it new.

djantlive

just look at used cars with either option on ebay. u'll see supple leather has folds that look old where as regular seats look taught. i like regular seats better and they are fine for 2+ hr drives.

TamiyaGuy

I don't know if supple leather is any less durable (I have supple but with only 5K on the car, I'm not a good judge), but I recall seeing big leather swatches at the Porsche dealership. There was no difference in thickness between regular and supple leather. By the way, the seat leather is quite a bit thicker than you'd think. It's like heavy canvas.

According to the sales person, the difference is in the leather treatments which are applied to the leather. The regular leather has treatments which closes or seals the leather more than supple leather. As a seating material, it doesn't "breathe" as well. This treatment also tends to make the leather stiffer and more "vinyl" like. He said both should wear equally well, but supple leather was more likely to stretch over time. For what its worth.

What I can tell you from personal experience is that supple leather on a 1987 928 S4 I had looked like crap after a few years. The leather had stretched so much that the seating areas had distorted from the original look and really took away from the appeal of the interior, and I'm not a heavy guy.

AndyK

Interesting...why would you get supple leather again after the 928 experience - unless the car was perfect except for supple leather??

TamiyaGuy

Because I suspected the design of the 928's seat... or rather the foam was a contributing factor. I don't have a photo, but if you search for it, you'll see that the softer leather seat actually had a different seat style in that car.

It had these multiple rectangular foam pieces which formed the seating area, the stretching was in between these foam blocks. The 996 has a different design and probably won't show as much.

AndyK

I remember seeing 928's with terrible looking seats...cracking, sagging, etc. I guess that must have been the supple leather gone wrong?

Supple is very attractive to me, since I want a little more luxury than my bare bones feeling 944. But if the seat will wear or look different than the less-used passenger seat, I don't want supple!

TamiyaGuy

So, just to clarify, I never actually had problems with the leather cracking. I suspect that's really a matter of sun exposure more than anything. I only had the car for 4 years, so I don't suspect serious issues would have developed.

snaproll

We ordered our 2002 with supple leather and have had no problems. Can't say re. durability with standard leather as we've never had a Porsche with standard. We use Effax leather balsam on the interior - it's a saddle treatment and can be found at tack stores.