Replacing Your S197 Mustang Cloth Seats with Leather Is Easy as 1-2-3
If your Mustang came with manual, cloth seats, Ford’s factory leather seats with power controls are plug and play.
While leather seats with power controls come in many modern Ford Mustang models, there are just as many pony cars sold with manually-adjusted, cloth-wrapped seats. If you own an S197 car with cloth seats and you want leather, you can buy and install custom seat skins or you can take the easier route and buy factory leather seats. With so many pony cars being sold during the S197 era, some hunting around will yield factory leather seats from higher-priced cars and if you can find someone selling their factory seats, that is the easiest interior dress-up project you will find.
Introduction
When “iceD” first posted his question to the forum, he was looking for information on whether or not seats from a same-year GT would fit and function in his base V6 car.
“Hey guys. My car is a 2014 base v6 with manual cloth seats. There is a guy selling his 2014 GT leather seats. I want to do a swap with him. His driver side is a power seat and the passenger side is manual.
Can i just go ahead and do a straight swap without an issue? He said it will be a direct swap and there is a power harness under my manual seat which will plug right up!
Let me know if you guys have experienced this before. Any opinions/insights will be much appreciated.
Thanks!”
However, about 28 hours after his initial post, he replied.
“UPDATE:
I installed the leather seats. They were a DIRECT swap. Power seat harness is built in to the connectors in all 10-14 mustangs from the factory whether the seats are manual cloth or automatic leather.
The seats look really good and I’m really happy.”
Along the way, the OP also included some pictures of his car with the new-to-him leather, which we have realigned and included here. It should be noted that the blue is from the interior lighting, there is no blue on the seats.
Community Questions
The first person to ask the OP a question about his seat swap was “firststang001”:
What about the airbag light? Did it give you any trouble? I have heard that swapping seats might trigger airbag light to go on.
To which the OP replied:
“No air bag light since the seats came out of a 2014 GT. (Mine is a 2014 V6)
However the guy that took my seats, put them in his 2010 GT and the air bag light came on. He fixed that by putting his ’10 bottom seat panel in my 14′ seats to put in his car and his airbag light was gone.
But if you are swapping 13-14 seats to 13-14 cars, it will be fine.”
More recently, “Jwolfe1021” asked if anyone knew about swapping older leather seats into a 2014 V6 model.
What about 2010 GT leather seats to 2014 base V6 with cloth? ANy light problems? How would I get the heated seats to work?
And while the OP hasn’t replied, “wanted33” offered up some solid info based on other information in the thread.
“According to the original poster the bottom seat panel from your ’14 will have to be used with the ’10 seats (just the opposite of what was done) if you have an air bag light. As far as the heated seats you may have a problem there. You will need switches to turn them on, and off. I’m fairly sure that any type switch that’s suitable would work, but I have no idea how they would be hooked up.”
The bottom line here is that if you have cloth seats in your Mustang, leather seats with power controls from the same model year will bolt in, plug in and work as expected. If you are swapping between an early S197 and a later S197, you may need to switch some parts from one seat to the other, but the seats will bolt up and work in like-models.
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