| by experience that I prefer cloth seats to leather/vinyl seats simply for the factor of safety. It may not seem apparent off the cuff that cloth seats are safer than leather seats, but allow me to elaborate. This accident: 
... by way of a drunken driver slamming into the rear of my stationary Z with a Mazda B2200 at a speed of only ~30MPH, caused my body to slide "up" the semi-reclined leather seats and my head impacting the solid roof of my slicktop. The impact bowed the sheetmetal up about an inch in height and split the paint radially from the point of impact..... to say the least, my neck wasn't "right" for several weeks thereafter. The neurologist that examined the xrays taken of my neck told me that I was lucky I didn't fracture any of the first few vertebrae within my neck given the extent of the impact. In the end, call me a hypocrite - I'm still using the same seats that were in my original Z.... although I am planning a revamp of my interior between now and ZCON 2007, which will use only cloth material for the seat covering. I'm making the "educated guess" that if I had cloth-covered seats, I would not have slid up the surface enough for my head to have hit the roof. Although I prefer empirical testing to determine what is for better or worse, testing whether or not my head would impact the roof in a rear-end collision when using cloth-covered seats isn't something I'm prepared to quantitatively test. For the mean time, I pay very close attention to my rear-view mirror and intend to install cloth-covered seats in short time. :)
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[ agpowers@bellsouth.net ] Enthusiasts soon understand each other. --W. Irving.
Are you an enthusiast? If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
Albert Einstein
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08:57:08 08/25/07
Not intentionally "raining on your parade", but I can say - 
