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-   -   Adjusting your seat & driving position optimally (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/technical-stuff/207742-adjusting-your-seat-driving-position-optimally.html)

This has always been an area that has been of importance to me and a source of great irritation!

I find people typically adjust the back to be too reclining (causing backaches) and sit a little too far back. (Novices tend to be too close and hunched forward).

I adjust as follows:

- Adjust the height so that I am comfortable placing my foot flat with enough support for my thigh
- Move the seat so that I can press the clutch fully with a slight bend in my knee
- adjust the back so that I can rest my wrist on top of the wheel while leaning back in my seat
- adjust the mirrors until only a little bit of the car's side is visible . (The SAE model does not work for me when I back up and I need to back into my garage daily)

Here's what Jaguar recommends:

https://youtu.be/XGfmPkMtlWY

I don't think there is "one position" that suits all. Everyone has their own preferences. Personally, I prefer the seatback reclined, steering low and the seat pushed a little further back than normal.

But yes, I'm VERY very particular about my driving position. In some cars (usually Japanese), I'm able to find it within a minute or two. In others, I'll spend 10 minutes making it perfect. The worst in terms of ergonomics are Fiat & Tata. Even their flagship - the Hexa MT - has many ergonomic nuisances.

Related Thread

The best driving position is one which makes you feel comfortable. If you are not comfortable, you will not be able to drive well. However, one could still make a few generalizations:

1) Sitting too close to the steering wheel and pedals can jam your legs and arms and increase the reaction time. When I was teaching my wife to drive, she kept pulling the seat close to the controls. It gave her a false sense of security that everything is within reach.

2) Sitting too far can cause clutch to slip. Of course you can get used to it over time and control this, however I have experienced strain on the left foot if this is done over long periods

3) Reclining seat too far back - This is ok as long as you have a good headrest which keeps the head (and thus the eyes) at a proper level with the road. On long journeys I have combined a neck pillow (those soft doughnut shaped ones) with a reclined position to great effect. There is usually a big gap at the base of the neck and the seat support in almost all cars, and a neck pillow fills that snugly.

I'm 5'10", and I drive a small car (Santro Xing) so I have to push the seat all the way back when I have to drive. However, I've found that no matter what position I recline my seat in, I can never rest my head on the headrest. Adjusting the height of the headrest doesn't help either. Also, on long distance drives, my feet start paining. I'm sure this is due to the fact that I push my seat back to the farthest position, but if I don't do that, I barely have any space to move my legs in the footwell.

I guess the point of the video is to educate people on the optimal way to adjust the seat for long term health, despite it feeling "uncomfortable " or "weird" in the short term.

Have you tried a car neck pillow?

You might also be interested in following thread - https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/modif...ng-drives.html

I could be mistaken, but are headrests meant for resting one's head while driving?
My understanding is that it's there to reduce the impact due to rearward motion of head and/or neck in the event of a collision. I believe the problem here could be that you are unintentionally always trying to rest your head against headrest which makes it uncomfortable after certain amount of time.

I apologize, my original post was unclear. I do not intentionally try to rest my head against the headrest, I've just observed that I've never been able to rest my head on them.

About the use of headrests, I too had the same idea until I came across the following image in a post in another thread:

Please give these a try if you haven't yet.

• Santro has a nice dead pedal, use it always to rest your left foot. Santro usually has a short and smooth clutch travel unlike other Hyundai cars
• As shown in the Jaguar video, adjust the position of seat so that you can fully depress the clutch with still a little bend on the knee and your lower back is fully backward touching the seat back. Also the elbow should have a slight bend when you hold the steering wheel(ideally somewhere between 2 & 3'o clock and 9 & 10'0 clock)
• Adjust the steering height to get the correct bend on elbow and shoulder level
• If that position makes ingress/egress difficult with thigh brushing against the lower part of steering wheel, you need to have 2 positions for either your seat or your steering wheel - one for ingress & egress and one for drive. If it is seat, you can take the relative position of seat back with A pillar as reference to quickly slot in the perfect position. Or you can count the slots when you slide forward - like 2 slots forward from the full back position.

In my case, I am very particular with my driving position and absolutely hate it when someone fiddles with it in my car. When I get into another car to drive, I am ready to spend a good 2 to 3 minutes to get the positioning sorted before pushing on.

Update: Drove for around 100kms today (purely city driving), and my feet didn't pain. I was much more relaxed throughout the drive as well!
Reason: Took SmartCat's advice in another thread and removed the shoddy seat covers that hid the actual contours of the seat, and therefore I was able to sit in a much better position. The OEM Santro Xing seats are amazing, and if anyone has been using a seat cover on them, please take those off. You don't know what you're missing out on.

The term Head-Rest is indeed a misnomer. The purpose of the head rest is not to rest one's head while driving, but to prevent whiplash injuries to the neck.

You're not doing it wrong - the head is supposed to be upright, not rested.

I didn't quite understand the last two images in the above post. As far as I know, the headrest only has vertical travel. How did the image lady bring it forward to touch her head??

Facing this issue with my new drive (on longish tours) which is a rather low Sedan. If I keep the position to its lowest, one of the two happens:
- If I push the seat back, the legs are stretched out so I have thigh support but the foot is not flat on the floor and after a while, the legs are in discomfort.
- If I try to keep the feet flat on the floor, the thigh support is missing. (I could raise the under thigh support but then the angle between my back and hamstring is not ideal and causes back discomfort).

The most optimal is when I raise the seat height to maximum but makes me wonder if there should be a better configuration with the lowest seating(which is how I assumed one should be driving sports sedans).

P.S. It is funny in a way and I joke to myself that I bought a fancy car and now don't know how to sit in it lol: