The History of Rumble Seats

BY BENJAMIN HUNTING / ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 14, 2025

The early days of motoring took a much more casual approach to safety. With automobile speeds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries being relatively low, and road traffic largely consisting of even slower horse-drawn carriages, the idea of positioning passengers at the very rear of the vehicle (where they could serve as some sort of human bumper in an accident) didn’t raise many eyebrows.

So begins the story of the humble rumble seat, the most precarious accommodation ever invented for the automobile. Although this setup might seem like a piece of ancient history (the original “way, way back”), its presence lingered much longer into the modern era than many enthusiasts realize, inspiring seating arrangements that have held fast for more than 100 years.

But Where Will The Butler Sit?

Such flexible, or situational seating solutions predate internal combustions by several decades. In the era of horsepower that you had to feed and water, the gentry added fold-out seats to the exterior of their carriages to accommodate any hired help that might be tagging along. (After all, it wouldn’t do to have the nanny or the butler sharing the passenger compartment with the aristocracy.) These add-ons were typically called “jump seats,” on account of the servants who occupied them needing to “jump” to attend to their employer at a moment’s notice. Those located at the very back, however, were sometimes termed “rumble seats” due to the chatter and vibration associated with hanging off the tail of a moving carriage.

Jump seats naturally made their way to cars when the latter first arrived on the scene. But it wasn’t long before the nascent auto industry began to focus on the mass market, rather than simply sell cars as accoutrements for the moneyed class. As everyday people began buying greater and greater quantities of automobiles, the need to haul around servants dropped dramatically in favor of larger passenger compartments suitable in size for middle-class families.

Of course, not every car out there was intended as daily transportation for the entire clan. Roadsters and coupes continued to be popular, budget-friendly choices for single drivers or businesses. It’s here that the rumble seat first got a widespread foothold in the automotive consciousness. Even though roadsters and coupes typically only seated three across the front row, it wasn’t all that difficult for builders to reach back into the past and pluck ideas for occasional accommodations that could be stuffed, say, into the rear cargo compartment. Whenever an extra rider needed a lift from A to B, the rumble seat went a-rumblin’.

Danger And Discomfort, Together At Last

Most often taking the form of a simple padded bench that folded out from an automobile’s trunk, or in some cases a fixed throne, both forms of rumble seat were designed to handle occupant overflow. By the 1920s, rumble seats—whose name now took on the connotation of noise and bustle from sitting so near the automobile’s exhaust—had colonized many two-door offerings in showrooms, displacing older-style jump seats almost entirely.

If you were British, there’s a chance you called these seats “dickies.” Regardless of the nomenclature, rumble seat riders enjoyed a forward-facing position among their primary “comforts,” with some upscale offerings including a high-back shell at the rear, plus a fold-out fabric top to keep the elements at bay. If you were extra lucky, you got a set of side curtains, too, providing the same effective protection as a portable beach hut. Bonus points for those models that added built-in steps to the bumper or fenders to help with ease of entry when climbing over the car’s bodywork.

Not every owner was enamored with the rumble seat concept, so it wasn’t unusual for them to be removed in favor of additional luggage room at the rear. And who could blame them? It’s not like riders back there had much in the way of legroom to stretch out. On top of that, wind-in-the-face isn’t all that fun for most riders outside of the canine set, and only a handful of models thought to install a pop-up windscreen to mitigate the position’s more unpleasant bug-eating effects. Everyone else had to choose between grit in the eye or goggles.

Thus, rumble seats were mostly phased out by the end of the 1930s. The last American automobiles built with rumble seats hailed from the 1939 model year, although some British brands held on to the feature until nearly the 1950s.

Echoing Through The Jet Age

Despite having faded entirely from the product mix in showrooms, the rumble seat’s anachronistic grip on American automotive culture endured for a surprisingly long period. Whether it was nostalgia or simply a way for car companies to add a splash of something different in the rapid-onset jet age that followed World War II, the rumble seat occasionally reared its head in a host of unusual places.

Much of this vestigial interest was supported at the dealer level. In 1957, it was possible to order a “Birdnest” for the Ford Thunderbird, in the form of an aftermarket setup manufactured by a California company called Bird’s Nest. The outfit built fewer than 150 of these rumble seats for dealers willing to install them. There were also dealer one-offs, like this Studebaker Hawk which featured a rumble seat designed by Len and Corky Cooley (also installed on a trio of other Studebaker models from the same seller in 1960). Even Yenko got in on the act—sort of—by designing a “jump seat” for the 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray, albeit one that was only outfitted to the interior of the coupe rather than the trunk of the convertible model.

By the 1960s, however, rumble seats had lost their second wind. There was one last gasp from American Motors in 1966, when a concept version of the brand’s two-seat coupe, called the Vignale AMX, debuted what was called the “Rambleseat,” a play on the famous Rambler name. The Rambleseat was predicated on the assumption that a pair of adults might want to let it all hang out the back of a V-8-powered machine in the middle of a burnout. (In case this sounds dangerous, consider that they were, uh, partially protected by a pop-up rear window.)

This feature was immediately put to rest later that year, once the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act went into effect. The law made the reasonable request that riders be spared the fate of becoming human crumple zones. Although it never appeared in the production version of the AMX, that didn’t stop Jim Jeffords, team principal of AMC’s Javelin Trans-Am effort, from reviving the Rambleseat as part of the unofficial AMX-R high-performance special he designed in concert with Brooks Stevens. Planned to sell alongside the factory AMX in 1968, the R model was ultimately nixed when American Motors cut off Jeffords’ supply of cars that same year.

The Way, Way, Back Is Still In Play

Although the rumble seat is well behind us, its descendants haunted showrooms for decades. The most direct link to the rumble is the “way, way back” folding third row that was common full-size station wagons. Typically emerging from the cargo deck, this shallow bench was best suited to children and defined generations of road trip memories. At least before American minivans largely consigned wagons to the history books in the mid-1990s. A few European devotee brands kept the rear-facing third row alive throughout the next quarter-century, including the Volvo V70 and Mercedes-Benz E-Class. The Tesla Model S offered a rear-facing third row before discontinuing the option around 2017 when the Model X was on sale.

Jump seats, too, made a comeback, although on a much smaller scale. There are, of course, the terror-inducing lawn chairs bolted to the bed of the Subaru BRAT; these were installed in a bid to hoodwink federal regulators into ignoring the Chicken Tax, but far more common were the fold-down units offered by SUVs like the Toyota Land Cruiser and the Lexus LX, which technically added a third row but were more effective at interfering when trying to load larger items into the rear of these body-on-frame machines.

It seems unlikely that the rumble seat will ever return. In our world of airbags and electronic stability control, it’s hard to imagine that any owner would ask a passenger to cosplay Fury Road on the interstate—and even less likely that the legions of lawyers employed by any automaker would allow for the feature to ever flow from the digital pens of its designers. This makes the rumble seat, perhaps, one aspect of our automotive past that we won’t see mined for nostalgia on an upcoming electrified concept.

This article has been reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder, Hagerty. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Click here for more automotive tips and stories, or here for more information on the next Pomona Swap Meet & Classic Car Show.