Do Not Buy A Rear-Facing Third Row For Your Jeep Wrangler For The Love Of God

There are hundreds if not thousands of accessories you can buy for your Jeep Wrangler. Many of them are super ill-advised, but one may stand (or sit) above the rest: a bolt-in third-row seat. That’s right, you can – theoretically – buy an aftermarket third-row bench seat to cram two more people into your Wrangler.

2024 Jeep Wrangler First Drive Review

I say theoretically because the company that built these bolt-in rear seats, called “Little Passenger Seats” is now very much out of business. This is probably a good thing. If your first thought after seeing this was, “Wow, that can’t be safe” you hit the nail on the head. After a little bit of Googling, you’ll quickly find out that back in 2020, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration actually posted a “Do Not Use or Purchase” bulletin on its website regarding the seats.

Here’s what NHTSA had to say about the Little Passenger Seat back during the height of the COVID pandemic:

The bench seats are not certified as meeting Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which specify minimum safety performance requirements for motor vehicles and motor vehicle equipment.

Motorists who own the seat should stop using it immediately. This warning is especially important because the seats are frequently used by children.

The company is no longer in business, according to the Better Business Bureau. The bench was advertised as a custom third- and fourth-row seat for more than 70 SUVs and other vehicles. These uncertified benches may still be purchased online and are sometimes wrongly described as safe and approved for use.

So, these seats were available in a wide range of vehicles, but from some research, it seems like the most common application was indeed in the back of Jeep Wranglers. Owners could decide to either have the seats facing forward or backward depending on how motion-sick they wanted to make the third-row passengers before their death. From what I can tell, these seats were pretty much just bolted on using two L-brackets, which cannot be enough to stop them from coming undone in a crash. Yikes.

While it is undeniably a good thing that this company is very much defunct, these seats are still floating around out there. As I scrolled through Facebook marketplace – as I am want to do – I saw these seats listed for $1,000 on the website. I won’t blow up the guy’s spot, but he said that the seats came with a JK Wrangler Unlimited he recently bought but he doesn’t want them. He even goes so far as to mention the company is out of business but neglects to actually say NHTSA deemed them extremely unsafe. Kind of a jerk move if you ask me.

Custom Passenger Seats – Jay Leno’s Garage

As it turns out, even Jay Leno thought the Little Passenger Seat was the tits nine years ago. To be fair to Jay and the whole Garage, this is still six years before NHTSA dropped the “do not purchase” bulletin. Still, these little guys had a good run, didn’t they?

Anyway, if you see Little Passenger Seats for sale on your local Facebook Marketplace, maybe don’t buy them unless you’d like to see the untimely death of your very own little passengers. Just a thought.