atomicdroid

I saw the thread for swapping manual seats with power seats on 2015 and newer. Since I just purchased a 2012 xlt with manual seats I was wondering the difficulty of
swapping power seats in. The driver seat which is manual and toast, thus the question.

Thanks.

Spiky

Which level are you thinking about? There's about 3 levels of powered driver seat.

atomicdroid

I didn't know there were 3 levels. What are they? Are any simpler that the other?
Also was thinking of leather seats to replace the cloth.

Thanks.

Will_K

Just speaking in general, I'm currently in the middle of a seat swap project to install 2008 king ranch power seats with memory on the driver seat into my 2010 F-150 which has 6 way driver power seat and manual passenger seat. There are a lot of differences I'm dealing with that you won't have to deal with.

If you get a power seat that does not have the memory function your swap might not be too bad. I'd recommend staying away from memory because it has a lot of connections to other features outside of the seat - mirror, pedals. I'm planning to ignore those, but I haven't started trying to install the driver seat yet.

Your passenger seat has electrical connections to the vehicle safety systems. I think these should be the same between any 12th generation seat.

With those things said aside, power seats are pretty much self contained. The switches are on the side of the seat so you mostly need to feed power and ground and it will run.

If you're picking up the seats yourself from a u-pick salvage then you probably need to bring a way to power the seat with you like a jump start battery pack. You'll need it to operate the seat to move it forward and back if you want to use anything other than a box wrench on the 4 seat bolts. But you might be okay without that - for my 2008 seat the rear bolts were in the track, but for 12th generation they're offset so the track doesn't cover the bolt.

When you remove the seat, cut the harness with as much length as you can where it goes into the carpet.

Spiky

The base 6-way power seat is self-contained. As Will said, memory versions and then 'climate-controlled' above that must be a complete pain to try to upgrade. It's a crazy mishmash of computers that you'd have to reprogram or add. And harnesses.