A bucket seat is an upholstered seat in a car, truck, or motorboat that seats one person. Its contrary is a "bench seat", which goes across the car, for example, and seats more than one.

The term appears to come from the French word, baquet, meaning "cockpit". They do look like the seats found in the cockpits of an early aircraft, which are still used today. A single-pilot aircraft naturally has a bucket seat.

In racing vehicles, there is usually only one bucket seat; vehicles sold to the general public often have two in the front of the compartment; they can also be found in the rear sections of the compartment. Commercial aircraft now have bucket seats for all passengers.

Automobile bucket seats generally came into use after World War II on European small cars, due to:

• their relatively small size for a bench seat; and
• lack of seating room for middle passenger, due to the presence of a floor-mounted shifter and parking brake lever.

The bucket seat trend was especially apparent in sporty cars, particularly the two-seater sports cars, most of which were manufactured in European nations.

For decades, typical American cars were generally equipped with bench seats, which permitted three-passenger seating. But the advent of compact cars and specialty vehicles, such as the Ford Thunderbird, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the sporty versions of both standard-sized and compact cars, accelerated the bucket-seat trend in domestic cars around 1960 and 1961. These developments led Detroit to offer sporty versions of their standard passenger cars (often complete with bucket seats, center consoles and floor shifters), often hooked to a four-speed manual transmission, often called "four-on-the-floor", engine gauges and fancy trim.

By 1962, more than a million U.S. built cars were equipped with factory bucket seats, which were further popularized with the advent of the sporty compact cars, often dubbed "ponycars", such as the Ford Mustang.

In later decades, as cars got smaller in order to meet increasingly stringent fuel economy standards, as well as intense competition from imported cars (particularly Japanese models), bucket seats became the standard on more and more domestic cars with each passing year. The the once-standard bench seat is now generally relegated to a few larger sedans and pickup trucks.

The center console, often found between the front bucket seats in most automobiles, usually includes a storage compartment and a floor shifter for automatic or manual transmissions. It may also include an ashtray, cupholders, and possibly some other instruments and functions, such as a hand-operated parking brake lever. The latter is commonly found on sports cars and small economy cars which are most often equipped with manual transmissions, for which the hand-operated parking brake is a lot more practical than the foot-operated parking brake, typically found on domestic mid-sized and larger cars. Bucket seats, therefore, offer a functionality that bench seats do not.

Auto parts