- Toyota turned the Crown’s actual power seat into a luxury desk chair.
- The chair reclines, heats, cools, and keeps the original seatbelt buckle.
- Pricing lands near $3,500, rivaling the most expensive office chairs sold.
Those who want to spend thousands on an office chair have an abundance of options. Herman Miller, Humanscale, Steelcase, and Haworth all sell four-figure seats for those who basically live at their desk. None of those, even the most featureful of the group, cost as much as Toyota’s new Crown office chair. Of course, none of those other brands offer a seat belt buckle either.
Those fancy brands will go to great lengths to explain how they designed their chairs. Rather than designing some futuristic gaming throne from scratch, Toyota Boshoku, the company responsible for many of Toyota’s interiors, looked at the front seat of the Toyota Crown and basically said, ‘it’s perfect’.
Read: Toyota’s New JDM Crown Estate Gets A Pull-Out Deck Chair And 302 HP
Based on the electric front power seat used in the Crown, the desk chair keeps much of the same functionality you’d expect in the actual car. That means power recline, height adjustment, front tilt adjustment for the seat base, and lumbar support. It also gets seat ventilation to reduce sweating and a seat heater for colder days. Who needs central heating and air with that kind of setup?
Probably the most hilarious part of this seat is that the seatbelt buckle remains in place, but is now a USB port to charge devices. Toyota doesn’t say how large the onboard battery is or how long it’ll last between charges.
To make sure this thing actually works as a desk chair and not just a detached car seat awkwardly balanced on casters, Toyota Boshoku worked with Japanese office furniture company Itoki. The chair’s base, height adjustment mechanism, and armrest structure were all developed with Itoki’s help so it could preserve the comfort of the original Crown seat while functioning like proper office furniture.
It’ll be sold through Toyota’s premium domestic Crown retail network, known as THE CROWN, as part of “THE CROWN COLLECTION.” Pricing starts at 495,000 yen, or roughly $3,500 at current exchange rates. Toyota says only 70 units are planned, and if demand exceeds supply, buyers will be chosen by lottery.
