Seat covers: SupaFit Canvas
It’s good to protect your seats. I elected to go with SupaFit canvas seat covers for my car, and I’ll go through some of the reasoning and also how to fit them to your car.
I was really happy with the ordering process through SupaFit and they delivered the seat covers faster than they said they would. I went for plain grey canvas, no logos at all; I’m ok with the plainness and I wanted canvas for waterproofness and longevity.
I did get a tiny discount off retail for buying these at a 4wd show though I knew I wanted these specific seat covers before putting in the order anyway; the discount was a nice bonus!
Thoughts behind my choice
A key consideration with a modern car and seat covers is around the airbags inside the seat. Universal fitment seat covers used to be a good value option but it’s riskier with seat mounted airbags – you need to make sure the seam is correctly positioned and engineered to work with your particular seat and airbags. SupaFit is one of the companies (along with some other high end seat cover manufacturers) that put in a lot of work around this; it’s important to make sure what choice you make isn’t necessarily compromising your safety.
The other consideration for me is around the product sourcing and I know SupaFit work pretty hard to be as Australian as possible. A lot of manufacturers will say they are Australian made, but it’s really Australian final assembly with a lot of work offshored; SupaFit’s factory happens to be a few km down the road from me.
They also make a really nice looking denim seat cover which is pretty waterproof, but not quite as waterproof as canvas. Since I often do beach trips with my car and might get in while still wet I wanted waterproof so it made sense to get canvas. I don’t find them uncomfortably hot or unpleasant to sit on, and they are more fitted into the car than I expected canvas seat covers to be. I did get grey because black seemed silly in the Australian sun.
Onto fitting them to the car!
Fitting them to your car
Start off with a bare seat.
You’ll want to give the seat a very thorough clean; it’ll be the last time you see it for a while as these seat covers won’t need to come off for a while!
The seat backs are labelled and orientation of the seat bits matter so go through now and sort out which bits of your delivery go where.
Good time to lay out the seat base as that’s the first part, and familiarise yourself with the various straps to work out where they go.
Flip the cover over, and push the flap through the gap between the seat base and the seat back for the straps to end up fastening to.
There’s a strap that goes under and around the adjuster/forward tilting lever.
You’ve also got the strap that goes from the front to the back down the centre of the seat and underneath it.
With those straps through then fasten them underneath the larger flap that was pulled through from between the seat base and back.
Headrests need to come off to put the seat back part on. You get these off with the button beneath the headrest itself – push the button in and lift the headrest up. The button isn’t easy to get to with the headrest all the way down though!
With the headrest removed, you can pull the seat back cover down. There is another flap here that needs to get pulled through, but pull it out forwards to help get the seat back aligned correctly. This is especially important to make sure you have the airbag seam right up against the seat’s airbag seam itself.
This flap goes through the gap between the seat back and the seat base, and meets up with a corresponding flap from the back.
Chuck the headrest cover on the headrest, put the headrest back in and one seat is done.
Rinse and repeat for your second seat and the backs if you’re doing them, and all sorted.
You’ll note some creases and things with these covers; this is typical of canvas. Take a bit of time to smooth everything out and then over the coming days in the heat of the car’s interior it’ll smooth out nicely.
Even after a couple of days they were very smooth and look great. Very happy with them in terms of comfort and also how they’ve worn in.
Washing them
A year and a half on I haven’t yet washed them, but it’s probably getting on for time that I should. SupaFit suggest washing them just in plain water, no detergent, all by hand and then dry in the shade. When it gets time that I feel I should wash them then I’ll do a before and after here.