What It Was Like Riding On The Highway In Some Of The Craziest Seats Ever Put In A Car

Since I was a child, I’ve had a dream. A simple dream, perhaps even a stupid dream, but a dream nevertheless. It’s a dream that should be achievable, but has proven elusive for many, many years. It’s a dream of freedom, a dream of adventure, a dream of the feeling of wind in your hair and exhaust in your lungs and bugs on the back of your head. It’s a dream of turning a desperate ploy to thread a loophole in a strange law into a manifesto about the joys of motion.

It’s a dream of riding in those ridiculous seats in the back of a Subaru BRAT.

You know the ones, right? Two plastic seats with a pair of grab handles each, bolted backwards into the bed of the little truck. Those seats exist not because anyone actually wanted them there, but to allow the BRAT to pass through a loophole in a tariff that was the result of America being too good at chicken farming. The so-called Chicken Tax.

I covered this back at the Old Site, and we’ve covered it in more detail here, but essentially it’s like this: Europe was mad that America was flooding the market with cheap frozen chickens, so they put a huge tariff on delicious American chickens, so to retaliate President Johnson signed Proclamation 3564 into law, which put tariffs on imported potato starch, Dextrine, and light duty trucks. The tariff for trucks was an astounding 25%!

The original target of the Chicken Tax was mostly Volkswagen Type 2 pickup trucks and cargo vans, but the tariff covered all imported cargo vehicles, which included those from Japan, like the BRAT.

There was a workaround, though! If you could convince the government that your vehicle wasn’t a truck but instead a passenger car, then you would just have the usual 2.5% tariff, and not the crippling 25% one! So what do passenger cars have that cargo vehicles don’t? Seats!

Yes, Subaru bolted a pair of seats into the bed of the BRAT so they could say, look, this is a little four-passenger car! And people believed it!

Subaru really leaned into the seats-in-the-bed thing, featuring people cavorting and gleefully enjoying those seats in their ads:

I remember seeing these ads as a kid, and seeing BRATs and their funny plastic seats and wanting, desperately, to try them out. It was those handles that really got me: each seat had a pair of rubberized handgrips that were a lot like the handlebar grips on a BMX bike, promising some intense adventures from those seats.

I’m telling you all this because just this past weekend, David Tracy and I got a chance to ride in those seats on a Subaru BRAT, and it was sublime. We even got to go on the 405 freeway! Which was sorta terrible and wonderful!

Here, just watch:

So what is it like to ride in those seats? I mean, it’s fun, in the way that riding in any pickup bed is fun, but there’s an extra, mildly unhinged intentionality about it here, because, you know, they actually put some damn seats in the thing.

The seats are a little more upright than you’d guess, and since they’re mounted on a flat truck bed, your legs are going to be stretched out, but that’s fine, as there’s plenty of legroom.

There’s also infinite headroom, which is great until you realize your head is actually over the roofline of the truck, so in the event of a rollover, your spine will be acting as the roll bar, which I’m told many chiropractors feel is “not ideal.”

Around town, it’s a hell of a lot of fun – it’s like being in a convertible facing backwards, but with even less around you, as you’re basically just sitting in a bathtub.

On the highway, it’s a bit more punishing than fun; even though you’re facing backwards, the wind whips all around your face, flinging dust and dirt into your eyes, and the sensation of acceleration in reverse is a bit odd. You also feel extremely exposed, because you are, and there’s other cars whizzing right by your shoulder and the road is right there below you, sandpapery asphalt flowing past in a never-ending ribbon of danger – the whole experience is, um, engaging.

I can only imagine what a multi-hour road trip would have been like in the back of a BRAT. David is skeptical, but I believe it must have happened, many times, during the 1970s and 1980s when our ideas of what “safe” meant were, let’s just say more impressionistic.

There have to be some people out there who, as kids, had to endure four or five hours of highway travel in the bed seats of a BRAT to go to Thanksgiving at their weird cousins’ place or something. They’d arrive all dazed and filthy and tousled, then immediately get tackled by some huge family dog and spend the rest of the visit flinching at the slightest movement.

I love the BRAT’s audacity with these seats. I love Subaru’s solution to the Chicken Tax problem, the defiant obeying of the letter of the law while holding down the spirit and slapping it around a bit.

Because these seats are from the factory, they’re legal to use in most states, which is hilarious when you think about how unsafe they are compared to absolutely any other modern-ish thing on the road.

They’re terrible and wonderful, clever, absurd things, and I feel a sense of peace now that I’ve gotten to experience them. Sure, our world is safer and more rational now that it doesn’t allow this sort of madness, but I think we’ve also lost something.