The Seats

The seats of the Ciaz are low as is the rest of the car. This means that you are sitting in a slightly knees up position. It's great to sit in a car where the under thigh support extends up to the back of the knees. That is not happening here. The seats of my Suzuki SWIFT were larger in this respect. They are perhaps the most generous seats I have found in any car.

However, the bottom line is that you will find nothing much to complain about.

Yes, I would have liked the under thigh support to be a little bit more in the rear seats, but you will be hard pressed to find another car that offers that.  But the seats work for me. I am average height. A longer squab can also be restrictive and it means that you need to have longer legs to rest them firmly on the floor. You also need to shift your drive's seat forward in order to be able to fully depress the clutch.

 

Lower Back Lumbar Support

This is something I just don’t get. Why don’t car manufacturers provide more lower back lumbar support. I fold a small towel and keep it at the back and it seems to make things so much better and ergonomic. I don’t find the front seats comfortable in the sense that they force you to sit in a slightly hunched manner. Most of the cars are like this. And I don’t understand why. Backs should be kept straight. But most all car seats force you to sit otherwise.

Acres of leg room at the rear

Plenty of space for front passengers

The Zeta gets fabric and
leather combination seats

Perfect recline angle and head rest for
the rear seat passengers.

Under Thigh Support

The Suzuki Ciaz is a bigger car with smaller seats. The under thigh support does not extend up to the back of the knees.
And even it it did, you would not quite feel it because as I mentioned before, this is a low car with low seats close to floor board. So when you sit in that knees up position, your knees do not come in contact with the cushion. Unless you stretch out those legs.

Cushioning / Softness

The Suzuki Ciaz seats are on the firmer side. There is evidence that a firmer cushion squab lends greater support to your muscles, making it less tiring and painful for long travels. But the question here is how much is 'too soft'. The Honda City all leather seats are softer than this and a pleasure to sink into. I have traveled in those seats both front and back in lengthy sub-urban travel. They seemed to pose no problem there. However, I cannot vouch for the longer highway trips. The Suzuki Ciaz seats are not hard enough to be un-comfortable. They are just firmer as all Suzuki cars are.

You can always make your Ciaz seats softer by putting in some cushion covers. The accessories section at your dealership can help you with this. Although it is a fact that I much prefer the feel of the original upholstery. If it was not for the concern of keeping it clean, I would put on the seat covers. They can never match the feel of the original seats. This is where I miss the all leather seats of the Alpha version.

There is an update to this below in the After 40000 km review. 

Front Seat Comfort

The people in the front seats can extend their legs out the best. Even I can do that as a driver, at least with my left leg. As this is an automatic, I can put my seat back and extend out my left leg and rest it on that foot rest next to the brake pedal.

This would not be possible in a manual transmission as you need your leg to be in a position to apply force on the clutch pedal and that cannot be managed from a fully stretched out position. The brake and the accelerator, however, can be easily handled with lighter pressure from the right foot and from this kind of a sitting position.
You will have to have driven an automatic transmission car to know what I'm talking about.

 

In fact, this is one of the very comfortable aspects of driving an automatic transmission car, your seating position and the way you can recline and sit back in your seat.

Anyway, even as the driver and front passenger stretch out their legs, they will find the missing under thigh support.

Rear Seat Comfort

As for the rear seats of the Suzuki Ciaz, there is more leg room than I have seen in any other car. You can push the front seats as far back as they will go and you will still have enough leg room left at the back to easily cross your legs or put a leg up of the other knee. Which makes the point of under thigh support a little more rueful. Has this extra legroom been carved out by cutting down on the size of the seats? That surely plays a role in this. The leg room at the back is more than what you really need and could have been better utilised to make the seat squabs more generous.

Overview And Comparison

The overall comfort level of the rear seats in the Ciaz beats the best of them at their game. The recline  angel is perfect. The level of the window is right. It comes sufficient below the head and neck line so that you do not feel claustrophobic. The window area is huge and including the cut-glass, you can turn your head as far as your neck will allow and still look out of some glass area. The head rests actually come up to where your head is and if tilt your head back slightly, you can easily rest on them.

Surprisingly, this is all in sharp contrast to some of the other major sedans in close competition to the Ciaz, like the Honda City and the Hyundai Verna. The City has a back seat with a back incline angle that is, well, too inclined. It is impossible to sit up straight in that car at the back. You are so far inclined that you are either in a neck forward position, which is a terrible posture to have at anytime, or if you want to keep your neck straight and rest it back on the headrest, you end up staring at the ceiling. You cannot do the simplest thing like look at your phone without craning your neck forward.

 

The head rest is another issue. In all models expect the top model of the Honda City, it is a fixed back rest that is far too low and does not support the head at all unless you want to tilt your neck so far back as to look at the ceiling. Not a relaxing position by any standard. The same is true for all the WR-V and all models of Jazz, expect the top variant that comes with the Magic Seats. The same top variant, however, does not come with an automatic transmission. 

 

I keep mentioning other cars with talking about the Suzuki Ciaz because I looked at many other cars and had a tough time making a final decision. At one time the Honda Jazz was a front runner. 

 

The window line in both the City and the Verna are high enough to come to my face. Not a good feeling.
Compared to these drawbacks, the slight smaller squab and slightly firmer seats seemed like a much lesser compromise on comfort. I prefer the rear seats of the current day Suzuki Ciaz as opposed to the current day Honda City and the Verna (2016).

The front seats of the City are arguably better. The all leather is 'oh so soft' and a pleasure to sink into. I also feels that they offer better lumbar support because of the more generous cushioning. I am not sure about the argument about the firmer squab for better long journey comfort though.

Update:

I am writing this a couple of months after having written the original post. I think a few things deserve a mention. By and large people who sit at the back love the amount of room they get and how airy the cabin feels.

 

The passenger side front seat is quiet low, though and the dashboard comes up pretty high in the field of vision.

A tad more cushioning like on the City seats would have been nice.

Update after 40,000 Km.

The verdict on the seats is not that great, I'm afraid. I have already mentioned that these seats are on the firmer side. But i do not think that is only because of the perspective of firmer vs. softer seats and which ones are actually better for a long ride. 

I personally feel that this is a cost cutting feature in the car. I have driven other cars from KIA and Honda and have made the observation that the seats keep me much more comfortable in the city driving as well as the long driving. There is less fatigue and back-ache in these cars.

Although I also have to point out that the fatigue in Ciaz also come from it having a stiffer steering than most other car brands out there. I do not know the reason for this. A stiffer steering is safer at high speeds and for off roading. However, almost all cars automatically stiffen the steerings at high speeds as a safety feature. Even SUVs today have lighter steering that what i get in the Ciaz. 

I will test drive a latest version of the Ciaz and determine whether this issue has been resolved. If it hasn't then this might be another cost cutting feature. Remember than even compact SUVs like a Sonnet cost 20 - 30 % more than a Suzuki Ciaz. 

Coming back to the seats. The seats feel good when you get in first, as. most stiffer cushions feel. They feel like they are supporting you more and you are not just sinking into them. But for me it turn to discomfort quickly. I sometimes wonder if this is more of an issue for smaller and thinner people. The seats feel concave to me. 

My lower back bends inwards because there is zero lumbar support. Seats like these are the reason people used to drive with a towel tucked in behind them for some additional lumbar support during long drives. Which brings me to another disadvantage. 

You cannot use a lumbar cushion or folded towel for support.

I thought the simplest solution for this issue will be to use a ergonomic cushion specifically meant for giving additional support in car seats. However, this too is impossible for the driving seat of the Suzuki Ciaz. The reason for that is that the seats of the car are small. They come up to the middle of one's thighs so there is no thigh support to begin with. 

Putting even the smallest and the slimmest of cushions behind you for back support pushes you even further out in an uncomfortable and un-drivable position. The car cushions did not work so I tried to do this with a folded towel. However, you can put nothing between your back and the seat without being way too much ahead.

In a nutshell there seems to be no way to resolve the problem for car seats that are too stiff, without adequate cushioning and no lumbar support. Or is there?

Putting on Seat Covers for additional cushioning and support.

So I put on the seat covers on the CS race soon after purchasing it. It has quite lovely beige leather and fabric seats so I didn't want to keep them clean and protect them for long term use.

However, I was very surprised when I saw the seat covers that were available with the dealership about seven years ago. They were not fitted, very well. Meaning to say that when you slipped the seat covers on the original seat the seat cover wasn't flush with the original seat. The mid potion was higher and every time you got into the car in the front seats there was a gap between the seat cover and the seat which you pressed back on.

The seat covers had virtually no additional cushioning so it made no difference in terms of offering a softer experience or more lumbar support. However, I have recently seen the availability of some new seat covers for the Ciaz in the showroom. Since my existing seat covers are old and I need a change anyway I am going to make this switch. From the looks of it the seat covers seem to be more cushioned. 

I will update on this experience as soon as I make the change. I must comment that I got excited about making the change on the seat covers because recently I was driving the Kia Sonnet that seemed to have come with dealership installed seat covers that were very well cushioned and had excellent lumbar support. I am hoping that I will be able to make the seats in the Ciaz a little comfortable as well. Let's see.