Just wondering if anyone has ever retrofit front seats from a different vehicle e.g. w213/w222.

I searched the forum but didn't find an answer.

are the connectors the same between vehicle models?

would the controls work for a seat from a different model vehicle even if the connectors were the same?

 

This will not work dimensionally or electronically.

Forum members have had very poor luck even swapping different W212 seat types into their vehicles.

 

1. What is "Splitview"?
2. On the conversion to leather seats/interior: from what MY/model do they come-or are you swapping covers on seats?

 

1. Splitview is like two screens in one. It is built so that the front passenger can watch a movie while car is in motion but from the driver’s seat viewing angle you cannot see the movie, just the normal “stuff”.

2. In early 212 models leather interior was standard on E550. It was option on E350. I guess leather is an option in all of them now if it is even option any more on 213..?

 

indeed. on my 2016, each door has a door controller, and those talk CANbus to the seat controllers that actually drive the seat motors. so you not only have to have the same connectors, they have to use the same canbus messages and commands (the CANbus spec only defines the electrical signals and overall message format, it says NOTHING about what the messages or addresses mean in a given car[*]).

and when you talk about moving seats between /different/ cars, well, just about every model car has a different footprint for the seat rails and how they bolt to the floor. sometimes you can, far more often you can't. for instance, a friend wanted to put Volvo 740 seats in a Volvo 240, no way, no how, 240 rails were narrower and had entirely different mounting points. Now, I *was* able to move Volvo 940 seats into a 740 but those two cars had almost identical chassis, and even then I had to adapt the connectors for the seat power and seat heaters... these were much simpler than Mercedes seats as the motor controls were on the side of the seat, not on the door.

[*] - nerding out a bit. CANbus is a little bit unusual compared with computer networks such as ethernet. messages only have a SOURCE address, they do NOT have a destination, they are all broadcasts. The Door controller might broadcast a message llike: [source: left door controller, content: 'seat forward button pushed'], and the left seat module is listening for these messages. the actual message is, of course, just a few bytes of numbers, maybe left door controller is module 35, and seat forward button is message 16, so the actual message would be [35, 16]. A normal computer network like Ethernet, each message has a source AND destination address, and a standardized header format. An ethernet message can contain an IP message, and an IP message can be TCP, and a protocol like http is totally standardized so all computers can talk to each other over tcp-ip on ethernet without having to know anything about each other.