love the feel and smell of real leather! the upkeep of it however is a con for me, but it's a small price to pay for the luxury.

i have MB tex in my Merc and it's...not leather, but boy does it survive against the kids!

 

Beef cattle are not suitable for leather their hides get all beat up.

 

The first 3 cars I owned and all prior cars I was allowed to drive were all leather and I have always loved the feel and smell. However the IS500 nuluxe feels so good, I don't actually miss the leather any more. Early on in my career, quite a few of my friends and coworkers used to own Corollas and Civics with cloth seats and they always kind of had a musty smell which turned me off cloth seats completely.

One small comment about leather though - all my seats still looked like new when I junked, gave away or sold them. The drivers seat was a bit shiny on my GS350 but no rips or cracks. Searching online for used cars, the drivers seat seems to be completely wrecked or cracked for some reason or the other which is an immediate "no buy" for me. I've found very few pristine examples which are usually weekend cars like an LC500 or SC430. I can only imagine the previous owners were sweating copious amounts through their derriere?

 

Eh, cloth special edition then lol!

 

beef cattle hides are widely used for leather, look it up, of course they also grade them according to the condition of the pelt, not all of them are beat up. Quality of the pelts are also graded by the age of the cow and other factors as well. Even fur farms have different grades of their fur even from the same farm.

 

Yep, true high end leather is a totally different game. Exclusive herds are kept to make sure quality is correct, for mass market cars though they do use lower end hides in a patchwork manner if the quality is good enough.

 

Yes the nuluxe is decent, but what grade of leather did you have that you are comparing to the fake stuff?

There are 4 levels of real leather and people mistakenly think the first two are all that there is. Cloth sucks though as you said, just can't keep it nice long term and it always has a bad smell to it

 

also, there are no cattle breeds raised solely for their leather; cow leather is almost exclusively a byproduct or co-product of the meat and dairy industries. Nearly 100% of the animal is used, and it is not economically viable to raise cattle for hides alone

 

At one point Lexus farmed their own animals look it up.

 

Yep. Back when they actually tried, sucks to see how far they have fallen off. They did that to be able to compete with the true high end brands on quality

 

We are talking about now, and not Lexus specific in this thread anyway, don't have to look it up, even rolls royce don't farm their own cattle for leather, they just source the highest quality leather from reliable supplier.

 

An upholstery shop I deal with told me quality leather is not plucked from some random industrial beef farm. He even had examples where part of the skins were scratched those pieces he uses for smaller areas.

 

of course not, the high end leather products not only for upholstery, but for anything leather are from suppliers that provide leather sorted out for the highest quality.

 

If I had F-it money.
I'd have seats reupholstered by Roots Canada!

By far the best feeling highest quality leather! I've sat in their chairs at the corporate offices. Made with their leather.
Then when we did their Chicago Store... they sent down leather couches!

That's the kinda of leather seating I want!

 

I love the look of good leather, always have.
For my next car, I could go synthetic if it gjves me more options.

As long as it holds up as good or better.
Cloth is a deal killer for me, too hard to keep clean.

My 4Runner had cloth seats and almost impossible to remove the stains, rather have vinyl or leather.

Ps, I do feel bad about using hides of animals if they are farmed just for leather. I want to believe they come from food cows but now I'm not sure anymore.