>Oh yeah. Vinyl upholstery! That was the ticket when I was a kid too.
> My parents reckoned that cloth seats stained too readily, and leather
>was too expensive, so they tried to get vinyl whenever possible. That
>green Malibu I mentioned had vinyl seats along with all of its other
>endearing features.

Vinyl is a word I irrevocably associate with gramophones; but after a bit of googling that's what I meant yes.

>(Or did you actually mean, like, hard plastic? Like Polyprop chairs
>for seats? That would be hellishly weird, but, well, Renault, I can't
>entirely rule it out. :)

And you've just reminded me of the car driven by the parent who took us home from Cub Scouts in the part of the year when it was dark at 8pm and we weren't expected to walk home.

It had started life as one of those iconic small British cars; my memory tells me it was some model of Morris Mini but I couldn't swear to that. But this one had been through the hackers workshop a few times, the speedometer didn't work but had been augmented with what I think was a cyclocomputer attached to one of the front wheels. One of the indicators was operated with a pair of plyers and the floor was more hole than floor. But relevantly the rear seats had been replaced with a battered (hard) plastic bench which had been loosely screwed to that floor. Also the parcel shelf had been removed which allowed the owner to seat an additional two or three small cub scouts in the boot; something that I'm not sure any of the other parents knew about. As a result on a good day this vehicle would carry 8 cub scouts and the driver away from the scout hut; fortunately only for about a quarter of a mile before the first one got out (google maps tells me I lived a third of a mile away and I was about halfway down the list).