very nice man! keep it up

 

How about this - what if you get RHD Japanese Evo seats?

Do you turn the passenger into the driver because that's the side the belt is on?
Can you swap everything you need to, or do you need to find someway to keep the RHD JDM driver seat what it is and switch to the LHD side here?

 

I'm not an engineer at Mitsu, so I can't say for sure. But I am an engineer, and I can take a shot at making sense of this.

You should be able to do this plug-and-play, no modification needed. The car will be looking for the signal on the wire that is run the the US driver side (left side). Since both front seats have buckle sensors, it shouldn't matter which buckle is used, just that the driver seat makes the switch (sensor on) when you're driving. I would assume the connectors for JDM and USDM are the same, so you shouldn't have an issue there. You won't want to switch which side of the car they go on because then the side airbags would be in the center of your car.

Thinking about it a little more though, you'll need the weight sensor(s) on the passenger side, not the driver side, so hopefully your USDM seat rails with sensor(s) will swap onto the JDM seats just fine. I assume they would. This would have to be done even if going from USDM Lancer seats to USDM Recaros, so I don't consider this "extra work" that you'll have to do to use JDM seats. It just might be an extra risk in not knowing if our seat rails will swap over correctly.

I will say I'd expect you'd pay at least $1500 to air freight them over (1 week), and maybe $500 to go by sea (5 weeks). Not cheap, but definitely a cool option to have. Though I doubt you'll find JDM Final Edition seats (w/ red stitching) for sale, if that's what you're trying to do.

A bit off the subject, but a little info to give you some hope of it all working. I also own an RX-8. The driver seats are powered, the passenger seats are manual. It's a bit odd, and some people don't like that. One user on that forum bought a RHD driver seat (I think it was JDM) and installed it into his passenger side. It all worked plug-and-play, including the power seat motors, the heated seats, etc. So, it's been done on other cars, and it should be possible here.

Let us know if you try it and how it goes!

 

Thanks for playing the "What-if" game.

I ask because of this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/08-14-LANCER...RYVuOp&vxp=mtr

I guess one advantage would be the re-purposed passenger seat is, relatively speaking, new.

As for Final Edition seats, I can wait for one of our Canadian brothers...