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A bucket seat is a seat contoured to hold one person, distinct from bench seats which are flat platforms designed to seat multiple people. Bucket seats are standard in fast cars to keep riders in place when making sharp or quick turns. According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', the name derives from the seat "partly resembling a bucket in shape". Racing vehicles usually have only one bucket seat. Vehicles sold to the general public often have two bucket seats in the front compartment, and may contain more in a rear compartment. Commercial aircraft now have bucket seats for all passengers. Automobile bucket seats first came into use after World War II on European small cars, due to: *Their relatively small size compared to a bench seat; and *Lack of seating room for a middle passenger, due to the presence of a floor-mounted shifter and parking brake lever. The first motor sports and fast road bucket seats in Europe were manufactured by Colin Folwell, who subsequently founded Corbeau Seats in the UK in 1963.〔()〕 The bucket seat trend was especially apparent in sporty cars, particularly two-seaters, most of which were manufactured in European nations. ==Use in American cars== For decades, American cars were typically equipped with bench seats, which permitted three-passenger seating. The advent of compact cars and specialty vehicles such as the Ford Thunderbird in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and sporty versions of both standard-sized and compact cars, accelerated the bucket-seat trend in domestic cars around 1960. By 1962, more than 1 million U.S. built cars were factory equipped with bucket seats; often, these were fitted with a center console containing a gear shifter and possibly other features between the seats. The popularity of the bucket seat grew with the advent of sporty compact cars (or "pony cars") such as the Ford Mustang. With the introduction of subcompact-sized automobiles such as the Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto, bucket seats were used due to the lack of seating room and the use of floor-mounted levers for the gear shifter and parking brake. While bucket seats continued to gain popularity among compact and sports cars, the traditional bench seat, which could seat up to three people abreast, continued to be the preferred front seating arrangement in larger cars and trucks until the late 1990s. By the 1990s, a few mid- and full-sized domestic cars, as well as trucks, offered bucket seat-console front seating options, for customers who wanted a sports-car image or personalized feel to their car. Recently, as U.S. cars were designed smaller in order to meet increasingly stringent fuel economy and safety standards as well as intense competition from imported cars (particularly Japanese models), bucket seats became the ''de facto'' front configuration among domestic cars. The last sedan to come with a front bench as standard was the 2011 Lincoln Town Car and the last sedan to even offer it as an option was the 2013 Chevrolet Impala. As of 2015, only some pickup trucks retain the front bench seat. As with carpooling, fuel economy averages per carpool passenger has increased as per the stringent fuel economy standards that subtraction of one front middle passenger is a rather moot subtraction from the fuel economy equation. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bucket seat」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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