Hi Guys,

There is someone parting out a car locally that has multi-contour seats. My GL350 does not. I have a year in the driver seat so I have been on look out for replacement seat anyway.

​​​​​​I am wondering how difficult it would be to replace my seats with the multi-contour ones. I read that switching to ventilated seats is pretty straight forward if you have heated steering wheel (which I do), but I cannot find anything about the multi contour seats. All I found is that they need an air pump and plumbing. They must have additional connectors? Do they require a special harness?
HAs anyone done something similar? This is all aside from coding the control units. I get that there is that part to it.

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It would be relatively straightforward if you got all the parts from the donor car.

now, ensuring that you get ALL the parts is the tricky bit - what differs between your wiring harness and the donor cars for example?

Startek/WIS or an Electronic parts catalog like at pelican parts can tell you that, alternatively taking a look at your seat harness sticker part number (A 164 something…) and comparing it with the donor car’s.

in my w211 the pump lived in the center console and I serviced it once.

so to sum up - get a schematic of the system and it’s associated part number, ensure you already have some of those and get what you don’t have from the donor car.

then off to coding it into DAS.

 

Alright, so this is it. I bought multicontour seats. I bought controller that has heated and ventilated button. I also bought air pump, bracket for it, the lines which are allegedly for x164 from pump to each front seat. I will do my best to document this all. so far I have learned following about the multicontour option:-requires pump in rear left corner behind first aid kid-pump has only 3 wires - one to power infront, one to fuse, one to ground. Same pump is used in 221 chassis.
-multicontour part has no electronic controls. The controller is a bunch of air valves. To me it looks like you could add multicontour without any programming. All you need is pump, lines and seats.
-from what I read, if you have memory seat option, it is same controller as what is needed for ventilated option. *Not 100% sure here
If anyone here has ever taken a car with multicontour apart, perhaps you can shed some light on the setup for me. On pictures, it looks like the pump has 2 ports - input and output. The output splits into lines to two seats, and line that goes back into input. Is this really it?! The output feeds input? Should there not be input otherwise? This is what I read on a Russian forum but I'm a little skeptical.

For the ventilated seats, can I enable that in Star, or do I need vediamo for this?

 

So - w211 experience input here - those dynamic seats somehow took input from a yaw rate sensing system to provide extra bolster on the out side of the turn. Go fast, turn left and the right bolster would inflate.I’m not sure if this trigger to inflate came from the yaw rate sensors or the relative pressure applied to the right booster…so self contained; maybe this signal is your input to your pump?

 

oh man there is a name for that. Dynamic seats or something? I hope someone can chime in and correct me if I am wrong but I do not think that it is a thing on x164.
I am kind of happy about that to be honest though. That feature seems hella cool to have BUT it seems like a pain to try and retrofit. I was extremely excited to find out that multicontour option is all air valve based. I was fully expecting to run more wires from the seat.
Tbh the reason I got into trying this retofit is that I bought this x164 that I want to be perfect to my liking, and it had a torn drivers seat. I thought that I may as well upgrade to ventilated seats in replacing the cushion for a little more, and eventually ended up finding w164 AMG seats for double price of just one lower driver cushion.so less work I have to do the better

AT this point I cannot find any info on pump air connections, so if anyone has any experience I would really appreciate. I may crosspost this on other forums too because this pumps is not exclusive to 164

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Hey guys!

In case anyone may be interested, I have succeeded. It is actually not even that difficult, just a bit time consuming to run all the lines properly. Best part - no programming required for either the multicontour or the ventilated features!

I will try to put together a DIY if anyone else wants to do this.

 

Good job!

Can you gone me some point how to? I'm thinking of doing same thing on W251, from heated sport seats to multiconture one. Any module that need to be replaced?

Thanks

 

Great! I think a diy for a sticky would be useful.
And yes multi contour and dynamic are two very different things - I appreciate the clarification.

on a side note, the dynamic seat implementation in the W211 was just plain useless and I left it deselected because the car wasn’t that well handling to need something like that.

 

sure, you will need new seats with that option, 2 pneumatic lines to run to the air pump, a special pneumatic line that splits air pump output into three (two connecting to the lines running from seats, one going back into the pump, to a pressure sensor), the air pump itself, possibly the bracket that holds the pump. Do you have WIS? I am not sure where it would be on R-class, on 164 it is in left quarter panel behind the first-aid kit. You will also need some wiring to the pump - 1 wire runs to ground pretty close to the pump, 1 wire runs to the rear fuse panel in right-quarter panel, and one wire runs to a distribution bus in driver footwell.

I will make a bit of a guide to it once i get some free time. I have some videos I took when installing. The biggest problem is getting the pneumatic lines, and running them and the wires for the pump under the floor liner. Assuming you have multicontour seats already that is

 

Hey, i have retrofitted multicontour seats to my w219 but i dont know where to connect the pump, i know where the Ground wire goes but the two others i dont know, Can you help me? Thanks

 

If you give me your vin I can try to look it up.
Assuming it's same pump one wire will go to power. The other to signal. Just no clue where they are on your chassis.

 

WDD2193571A112065

 

Hey. I have a -06 W164 and I have installed multicontour seats and a compressor and air hoses to the seats. But my problem is. One wire of the compressor is ground, the other goes to the fuse 66/30A. But where does the 3 wire go? Thank you very much if you can advise
My car Vin is:WDC1641221A034404
Donor car Vin WDC 1641221A072301

 

The 3 wire goes to Something that only has power When Your car is turned on, Think mine goes to fues 13 or 14, not sure tho, i have also retrofitted the Seats

 

Ok, Thanks. I keep searching

 

Hey. I have a -06 W164 and I have installed multicontour seats and a compressor and air hoses to the seats. But my problem is. One wire of the compressor is ground, the other goes to the fuse 66/30A. But where does the 3 wire go? Thank you very much if you can advise
My car Vin is:WDC1641221A034404
Donor car Vin WDC 1641221A072301

 

Hey,
käszner is exactly right. You will want to connect 3rd wire to ACC. If you look on starfinder, it will look like it should be going to comm bus bar in driver footwell. Do not do that! It will put gremlins in your electrical system until you disconnect it lol. Ask me how I know idk if that is mistake in diagram, or I read it wrong.
I will check what exactly I connected to and let you know in a bit when I go down to the car.

The way the pump works is very simple. It is fed power by the thick wire you mentioned with the 30A breaker. The 3rd wire, determines if it is on or off withe car (it is not smart and does not communicate to anything). Once it is on, there is pressure sensor in the pump that senses pressure in the pneumatic lines up to the seats. If you press the button to add air to the seat, it drops the pressure in lines, sensor senses it, and runs the pump until nominal pressure is restored.the sensor is through one of the two pneumatic connectors on the pump. The other connector is the output of the compressor. The input is just ambient air in enclosure. The sensor in the pump, and 2 seats are connected by the 3 lines split from the output of the compressor in the pump.
You can see this all yourself if you take theairpump apart, but hopefully this explanation saves you the trouble

 

As promised. This is how I wired it, can report that it works
Power - Fuse 66 in rear panel is for multicontour seats (30A)
SIgnal - Fuse 45 in rear panel is for right 2nd row socket (20A). I split from this and used a 5A fuse (if I remember correctly as per starfinder).

My reasoning was that sockets turn off after car is turned off (if there is no load immediately, if there is a load after some time).

Pictures showing both fuses:

The split from #45

Showing the fuses of the splitter - 20A is what was there, 5A is what leads off the red wire to the pump

#66 which powers the air pump. If you never had this option, you will need the fuse holder.
b

 

Awesome. Thank you very much. Now it's easy to do. Good pictures and well explained how things are done.

 

The seats work great now. Many thanks again. The compressor stopped working, well it had to be disassembled and the fault was found in the anchor and brushes. Sanding with sandpaper, and now everything works as it should.

 

Nice, glad it worked for you!

 

I am considering retrofitting dynamic seats on my 2002 cl500 turned cl55 amg. Seats came from a 2003 cl55. It appears there is not a ton to work that really needs done besides installing the seats. I will be swapping my door control modules because those house the buttons for the seat coolers that my 2002 did not come with

 

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is more to dynamic seats than just multi-contour. I think the take input from a computer for responding to corners.

But best of luck, hope you can make it work mate!

 

Don't confuse dynamic seats with multi-contour.

 

there are only two sensors that could even possibly be responsible for triggering the dynamic seats. It’s either an esp yaw rate sensor, or the steering angle sensor. Both of which are standard items on any Mercedes I’ve ever worked on as far as I know. These are inherent sensors in modern esp systems

if you’re already retrofitting lumbar seats don’t be too afraid of going the extra step for the dynamic seats. Mercedes is fairly smart about including the valve system, control module and the line distribution within the seats themselves. This makes it a simple air line connection under the seat and one or two electrical connectors

the only time consuming part will be trial and error coding esp, door control modules, and maybe the central gateway to reflect the proper channels of communication amongst the control modules. And seeing if there are any major differences between the harness of my existing 2002 seats and the 2003 dynamic seats