Something that I love about each comment section at the Autopian is that you are bound to learn something new, and maybe, you’ll have a laugh, too. That is thanks to our wonderful cast of readers, and the comments of today delivered. Did you know that an Oldsmobile makes for a great starting point for puns? Did you know that so-called vegan leather is sometimes made from plants?
We wrote about the 2026 Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, and V10omous has a valid complaint:
There’s no vegan leather to be found
This is a phrase that should never have existed, but at minimum should never be uttered or printed again.
Just call it vinyl, because it’s vinyl.
I’ve long found the marketing of modern non-leather, leather-like materials to be fascinating, because it seems automakers have cooked up interesting names for these seating surfaces. However, Cerberus makes a great point:
Plant-based textiles exist.
Which is pretty neat! Who is right? Technically both! Tesla’s standard vegan leather is a polyurethane-based, fully synthetic material. However, you can also retrofit your Tesla with BanbÅ«. It’s an organic material that is 83 percent plant fibers, primarily the fibers of bamboo.
Mark wrote a Shitbox Showdown featuring a 1992 Oldsmobile 88 and a 1998 Honda Accord. KYFire nails the first COTD slot:
There might not be much of a Delta between the two but I’m Eighty Eight percent sure I’d take the Olds over the Honda on Accord of the rust.
Perfection. Jason published a rant about how all cars should be able to just tell you a problem code. Rad Barchetta:
I got a check engine light once. So I opened the hood and checked. It was still there.
Michael Beranek:
Jason, Jason, Jason. Your heart is in the right place, and it’s so pure that you might not be able to see how absolutely, totally, completely Communist this idea is. You’re taking money directly from the shareholder’s hands. This will not be tolerated in 2025 America.
Have a great evening, everyone!
I prefer leather. It’s a byproduct of cattle production, so as long as I’m eating beef, I want to see the rest of the animal put to use, and save the petroleum for gas and oil instead of pleather.
The common way bamboo fibres are processed in order to make them pliable for fabric, is to vulcanize them. This essentially converts them to rayon or polyester. Same stuff that’s made from petroleum. So while the source may be ‘greener’, ultimately more plastic is created and potentially improperly disposed of at the end of it’s life. I would not categorize bamboo based fabrics as natural fibres any more than I would consider bio fuels as clean energy.
I agree vegan leather is a silly term, but I feel like they’ve made huge strides in quality of the vinyl materials. Our 2023 Niro has vegan leather, and it feel like leather, softer, has the perforation’s for cooled seats, and feels more premium. I remember 70’s nagahide and it was cheap, thin, and yes stuck to you in the summer, our car has none of these qualities!
Counterpoint: What if vegan leather is just leather made out of vegans? Since they don’t specify I think we have to assume this is true.
This was always my take on the stuff. Seems like a good use for vegans, they are always so annoying about it.
Oil originally started as plants, so…
There was an older land cruiser on BAT a few months ago. The selling dealer was bragging that the seats had been recovered using the finest vegan leather. When people started pointing out that he basically took the original actual leather covers off and replaced them with vinyl the seller lost it. The vehicle didn’t meet reserve needless to day.
> Plant-based textiles exist.
Uh…cotton is a plant. Plant-based textiles aren’t so exotic they need to be pointed out like that. 😛
if this misspelled ‘bambu’ stuff is the same as what is also marketed as Tencel(tm), then it is indeed a bamboo fiber based…textile. Thread. Cloth. Which would not make it a substitute-alike for leather, pleather, vinyl, PU, naugahyde (the poor naugas!) or ‘vegan leather’ because it is cloth seats in a luxury car. Call it what it is.
For the record, I prefer cloth seats for comfort, but prefer leather or leather-alike for not getting dirty. I’m not aware of anything that gives the full benefits of both. Maybe ventilated leather seats, but I haven’t had a car with those.
Back in the day, the finest luxury cars ALWAYS had fine cloth seats for the rich folk riding in the back. The help driving up front sat on leather. Sometimes without a roof, so they knew their place.
I would pick good cloth over leather or vinyl every time if I had a choice, but in the US you almost never get that choice. Really ground my gears that in Europe an M235i got a fantastic grippy cloth interior as standard, but no soup for you in the US, sticky sweaty vinyl or leather only.
Yeah, but we had that big war over it, then a lot of it moved to Central America and Egypt, so we don’t like to talk about it.
I keep waiting for the industry to change their slogan to:
It’s a bold move: Cotton
I made my points about vinyl/leather a few minutes ago, but you only have to go back to yesterday’s SBSD to find a couple of cloth interiors that are likely more comfortable than either.
1992 Olds 88 vs 1998 Honda Accord: Which Twin Cities Beater Would You Trust? – The Autopian
Maybe try to find west coast, southern desert examples instead of ones from the literal rust belt.
I bought a used Chevy Malibu with “leather” seating at one point. It says so in the materials. It was thick, shiny, vinyl. I hated the stuff!
But they could still legally call it “leather”, for some reason.
Cheap leather is basically plastic coated such that it might as well be vinyl.
Whenever someone is proud to point out they got Vegan leather I always ask how they like their crude oil accessory. Admittedly, Vegan leather might be the best marketing term ever to change the perception of a product.
Ever time I see “vegan leather” I immediately think “people were eating leather?!”
I think they should just stick with their proprietary names for each brand, that’s fine with me.
Vegan and Plant-based are on EVERYTHING and it’s starting to wear me out. Like a buy a jar of peanuts and it’s like “12g of plant-based protein” as if I didn’t know what peanuts were. Mouse testicles or something?
Geez. Start skipping reading articles about Teslas (there’s only so much one can take of reading about the products of a company run by a fash Nazi apartheid boy, especially with the CT) and one misses out on some discussions.
Yeah, the term “vegan leather” is silly but it was coined in an effort to get around the stigma of vinyl in light of how countless shorts-clad Boomers grew up burning the backs of their legs when getting into cars with vinyl upholstery in the summertime.
Indeed, that’s why they came up with terms like “Naughahyde” and the venerable and venerated “MB-Tex” and so on.
“Synthetic leather” would be fine since it’s analogous to saying “synthetic fiber” but people still have hang-ups about things synthetic, probably in part borne of coming of age during the disco era which was positively rife with polyester (that is, “synthetic fiber”) clothes, lol.
So many hot legs experiences in my vinyl-seated Datsun 510 in high school. Putting sheep skin covers on the front seats of my Peugeot 504 I replaced it with out of college may have been one of the smartest things I ever did. They didn’t breathe in the summer heat, but they didn’t scald, absorbed the sweat and were wonderful to sit into in the winter. I should see if I can get a set for my Honda, which has leather, but not Bentley luxurious leather.
When I had a young kid, I appreciated how easy it was to clean a leather seat. But cloth is so much more comfortable. Leather came with the trim level I wanted mechanically with the Honda.
I had a friend whose wife was vegan, and he had to special order an Audi to not have leather seats. They divorced. I don’t know why.
The cows are going to die anyway. Because we eat them. But I’d be fine with a durable, but not plasticky, cloth seat material. I don’t eat in my car, and I think it would be more comfortable.
As far as I can make out, the main difference between vegans and non-vegans is the size of the animals whose death in connection with their diet they find acceptable.
It feels to me like an ersatz morality arm-wrestling contest. I couldn’t care less.
I like to eat fish, chickens and four-legged animals. All in moderation.
I like salads, but I probably don’t eat enough vegetables, and I don’t like fruit.
I’m past retirement age and surprised I made it this far, given the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen and done. I’m ok with that.
I replaced the shredded vinyl seats in my 504D sedan with the cloth velour sport seats out of a 505. Fabulous!
It pisses me off to no end that you can’t get proper cloth seats in decent cars today, or for many years. The cloth found in cheap cars today is inevitably that recycled soda bottle crap and feels terrible. Where are the nice tweeds and velours of old? Base Saabs and Volvos were nearly the last holdouts, though I guess Volvo does (or did until recently) offer cloth in some models (but no idea how nice it actually is). A friend was able to special order a very early e90 325i with cloth, but it’s the only one I have ever seen on this side of the pond. I got a flat NO when I tried to do the same with my M235i order. I would have paid more for the cloth seats they got as standard in the Old Countries.
This would have been fantastic!
https://www.2addicts.com/forums/showthread.php?t=971586
I’m just going to take a moment to yell at the clouds. Most leather interiors, and all vinyl interiors are simply inferior to any decent quality fabric. Leather and vinyl is cold in the winter, sticky in the summer, and doesn’t breathe like fabric does. Furthermore, automakers position vinyl like it’s an aspirational feature. All it does is make me ignore the upper trims because I want fabric. Take the Sienna, or any other Toyota, for example, the base LE has nice fabric seats, whereas the XLE is all trimmed with “SofTex.” Which as far as I can tell is just well-marketed vinyl. I like some of the XLE features and paint options, but I’ll never consider a higher trim because I don’t want to stick to the seat all summer long.
I mostly agree, though I find a lot of the fabrics that manufacturers use in their base models to suck. Often it’s a reasonably hard wearing (good) but miserably scratchy, sad looking stuff that doesn’t result in a whole lot of comfort. The cloth seats I had in multiple 90’s cars were far more comfortable than most of the fabrics I’ve experienced lately. It’s like it was designed to get people to upgrade to leather (probably because it is).
Bring back nice quality, soft, comfortable fabrics.
Until all your kids are mature enough to not spill (or worse, vomit) crap in the interior, vinyl or leather is a better choice than cloth. Feel free to ask me how I know.
Having children is mistake #1 there. Though I have had friends who acted like children in the car, so I certainly feel your pain.
Interestingly, Henry Ford was sort of a pioneer of this. Dude was obsessed with soy beans. The Model T took 60 lbs of soybeans to make, with most of the plastic parts being out of soy beans. He had soybean foam in the car seats. His personal car had plastic body panels made out of soy beans (there’s a picture of him hitting the trunk lid with an axe to prove how tough the material was. Ford even had a suit made out of soybean fabric.
To continue the odd trend, he was also once the guest of honor at a 12 course all-carrot dinner
It’s not made out of vegans? False advertising.
Technically petrochemical based vinyl is plant based, but with an aging process.
I prefer vinyl to most mainstream leather and it holds up better. It was the most reliable thing about a 318i I had.
If vegan leather were actually made of vegans it would by definition no longer be vegan…
Nine minutes ahead of me, well played! Like Wednesday Addams vs. the girl scout cookies.
My seats, boots, belt and steering wheel are all vegan leather, if you ignore any bugs that may have been accidentally eaten by the vegans in question while they were grazing.
Thanks, Mercedes!
Real leather is organic, too. Just sayin’…
Funniest part is those bamboo based interiors are 30 THOUSAND DOLLARS. 30k. “But they’re biodegradable” ok, so you threw out a perfectly fine interior to put another one in, that just seems like extra pollution for no net benefit. Tesla people are definitely special.
Reduce and Reuse are both anti-consumption, so we as a society only accept one R.
Cows are vegans , right?
Calves are not because they consume milk.
They’re veal-gans.
Technically, that makes then vegetarians. I think.
Horrifyingly enough, many ruminants will consume meat if given the opportunity. Deer will gratefully feed from corpses and chew bones if low on calcium.
Cows? I won’t link it but if you’re not faint of heart there’s a video out there of a cow lazily vacuuming up baby chicks.
Oh, yeah, not necessarily strictly speaking, as cows are herbivorous and just generally don’t deliberately eat things not plant-based but livestock cows will sometimes eat bugs and small animals that happen to be in the livestock feed they’re eating… Heck, part of the reason that bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease, and other prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease exist at all is because livestock farmers would cut corners by grinding up leftover animal parts and the cadavers of sick cows that died before going to the slaughterhouse and adding that to the feed given to the living cows.
But, yeah, I couldn’t tell you how many boomers made the exact same joke about cows being vegetarians whenever they encountered vegetarians/vegans at family gatherings and other functions wherever food was served. Went vegan in the early 1990s after having been vegetarian on and off for a good decade before that so I’ve seen it all with the jokes and other forms of disparagment over the past 40-plus years. Yeah, nothing new under the sun, lol.
Naugahyde!
What about the poor Naugas, though? /s
https://www.theautopian.com/this-is-the-animal-gm-used-for-car-interiors-from-the-50s-to-the-70s/comment-page-1/
Hunted to extinction, evidently. When was the last time you say one, anything new made with their hides?
Veganhyde?
What’s weird is that it seems like everyone forgot that cotton, hemp, and linen are super common plant based textiles. Why can’t those be woven in a way that creates a comfortable and hard wearing seat fabric.
In a perfect world, I want wool. But that’s not vegan.
People are free to define “vegan” however they want for themselves. But I think most vegans would be okay with wool, because it’s not harmful or exploitive to the sheep.
If they are against milking cows and collecting unfertilized eggs from hens, then I would assume they are against raising sheep in captivity to be forcibly buzz cut every month or so.
Uh, I am a big dairy consumer, love eggs, don’t think a meal is really a meal without meat, etc; but lets be real here, vegans have some very legitimate points against those practices.
Milk production and mass market egg production does have very legitimate issues and is way way way different than wool production. For cows to produce milk, they have to be impregnated and then separated from their calves about every year. They also spend most of their life stuck indoors, in a high stress environment, standing in their own filth, packed in with too many other dairy cows, with little stimulation, eating food they wouldn’t naturally eat. Modern practice to milk them is to attract them to the automatic milking machine with the “good” food, as that is the only 2 highlights of their day. Sure, cows are dumb, but let’s not act like it’s enjoyable or something they would even choose to do on their own.
Chickens end up cramped together and just get juiced for continual eggs until they die. Again, typically very little space or stimulation. They often spend their entire life stuck in a teeny cage so they don’t fight one another in their high stress, shitty environment.
Yeah, there are better, more expensive, more humane alternative ways to produce milk/eggs, but the vast majority of people refuse to pay for it.
Sheep for wool production at least typically get to live outside grazing in a more natural environment as standard. I get it, all these animals are are highly domesticated and can’t really live on their own in the natural world, but the vast majority of cows, chicken, pigs, etc live pretty shitty lives all for our consumption. Wool producing sheep just happen to be one of the few domesticated farmed animals that happen to more regularly fall on the “better” end of the spectrum that is still probably pretty dang horrible for a bunch of reasons I am unfamiliar with.
Oh, many vegans tend to eschew wool due to the fact that wool production is all too often simply not humane. Factory wool production is indeed harmful and exploitative to the sheep. Also, sheep who have reached the end of their usable wool-producing are usually slaughtered so a lot of vegans (like me!) just prefer not to participate in supporting such an industry.
There does exist ethically and humanely produced wool that some vegans will wear but it’s miniscule compared to the rest of wool production. Easier and cheaper to forego any wool and go with alternatives…
Plus, aren’t sheep used for modern wool production, some sort of selectively bred breed that produces such a thick and heavy coat, that without human intervention they’d suffer and die?
I’m not a vegan, but as an outsider looking in, I can’t imagine many–if any–vegans considering wool to be vegan.
Yeah, all the more reason why many vegans (like me!) don’t wear wool so as not to support an industry that engages in inherently harmful practices such as breeding sheep that would simply suffer and die if left alone.
Yeah, wool ain’t vegan, that’s for sure! Though some vegans who do a lot of camping and bicycling in especially cold climates (or even just live there) will sometimes wear wool, ideally ethically and humanely produced, since common alternatives are leather and fur which are pretty much a no-go, lol. Wool is one of only a few clothing materials that retain their insulation value when wet, a boon for bicyclists who sweat a lot in cold climates or ride in wet and cold climates, though modern fabric technology has come such a long way over the last couple of decades that it’s no longer so easy to justify wearing wool.
Didn’t we used to have this stuff called “canvas”?
Will gladly take a plaid-patterned fabric interior.
Canvas is the best for plaid pattern! The 1:1 warp-to-weft makes coloration easy. Herringbone would need more like a denim/twill kind of thing.
I haven’t finished my coffee and realize this is not a high value post.
I hope you have a wonderful Wednesday, Bob the Hobo!
Insights regarding lesser-known details like the best material for specific upholstery patterns are always welcome.
I wish you a wonderful Wednesday as well and hope you enjoy your coffee, Crimedog.
This is a community that goes berzerk over the minutia of tail light designs and has at least 15 articles related to feces in one way or another, and you felt that wasn’t a high value post?
Oh, is 1:1 warp to weft the definition of canvas, as opposed to other textiles? I’d never thought of it, but it makes sense.