Back in the day, it wasn’t uncommon for station wagons to have fold-away third-row seats. Ford was the king of this: From their late 1950s Country Squire wagons, up through 1970s
and even into the early 1990s Taurus Wagons, Ford was obsessed with hidden, readily deployable third-row seating, mostly focused on families going camping and picnicking, but they also touted nine-row seating for couples taking their wagons out for fine-dining sojourns with their pals.
Nope: There weren’t any stinkin’ headrests! What are you, some kind of fancy person, wanting headrests?! Well, perhaps you are, and for good reason, because like seat belts and airbags, they save lives. This is one reason why the recent patent application from Ford, first spied by the folks at Motor Authority, is interesting.
Ford’s application appears to be for a third- or second-row seat that flips over 90 degrees, so that the rear upright becomes the base of a seat that back-flips out of the hatch and faces rearward. In the process, the bench becomes the back support, and the upright becomes the bench. And the headrests, cleverly, become under-knee bolsters, much like you see with some driver’s seats with extendable thigh bolsters.
There are a few advantages to what Ford’s showing. Their 2025 Expedition gets a split tailgate that allows the use of a divider in the hatch bay as support for your back if you sit on the bottom half of that hatch, but there’s no support for your feet. With their patented idea, Ford added footrests, like you might see in a business-class airline seat, and the upright is the bench, so it would feature cushioning.7
Riffing And Innovating
Ford’s not alone in wanting to reinvent tailgating. We’ve seen removable speaker setups from the likes of Rivian, and, of course, they invented that very innovative gear tunnel kitchen setup. But some of what’s interesting about Ford’s idea with this tailgate seat is that it plugs into a rear receiver hitch for support. Receiver bike and gear racks have been around for a minute now, and they’ve gotten lighter precisely because they rely on the strength of a 2×2-inch box of rigid metal that’s stout enough to tow a 3,000-pound boat.
Ford could make a relatively lightweight rear-facing seat for tailgating by relying on the supporting mechanism already hanging off the back of your rig, and the patent discusses using the receiver’s wiring (ordinarily used to power brake- and running lights on what you’re towing) to add lighting to the hatch bay. It also mentions lighting the ground below the tailgate. Ford logo, anyone? Or, you know, pay extra for your favorite team’s logo projected onto the parking lot? And they cryptically talk about using that juice for communications, so we figure a Bluetooth speaker built into the seat makes decent sense, here.
Top Speed’s Take
Ford has cared about modular tailgate seating for going on three-quarters of a century. Their new patent idea is clever because it seems relatively cost-effective to manufacture, and unlike Rivian’s super neat gear tunnel kitchen, this looks like an option they could bring to a lot of existing SUVs without a massive investment in tooling. Then again, right now, in an age when new steel and aluminum have suddenly become possibly precious metals, and Ford’s CEO is worried that new tariffs will bring “a lot of costs and a lot of chaos” to the car industry, innovation might take a backseat (pardon us!) to survival.
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