RECARO is a German brand, not a Japanese one, but it is so common in JDM performance builds — including the car that prompted this profile — that its history is worth getting right, and it happens to be unusually well documented.
A Coachbuilder, Not a Seat Maker, in 1906
The company was founded on 1 October 1906 in Stuttgart by Wilhelm Reutter, a 32-year-old master harness maker, as “Stuttgarter Carosserie- und Radfabrik” — a car-body and wheel workshop, not a seat company. His brother Albert joined as a partner shortly after. In 1909 the firm was renamed Stuttgarter Karosseriewerk Reutter & Co. and patented an early folding-roof design, a forerunner of the convertible.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Reutter built mass-produced car bodies for manufacturers of the era, including Daimler and Wanderer. In 1930, work with Wanderer brought the company into contact with Ferdinand Porsche’s design office, and Reutter went on to build bodies for early Porsche-designed vehicles, including Volkswagen pre-series prototypes from 1938.
1963: Porsche Buys the Factory, “RECARO” Is Born
After the war, Reutter built the first German-made Porsche 356 bodies (from 1950) and became Porsche’s primary body supplier, producing the large majority of roughly 78,000 Porsches through 1963. In 1963, Porsche bought the body-building side of the business outright. What remained of the Reutter company pivoted entirely to seating and renamed itself RECARO — an initialism of “REutter CARosserie” (“Reutter” plus the German/French word for car body, carrosserie).
The new seat-focused RECARO moved fast: its first “sports seat,” with foam cushioning and side bolstering, launched in 1965, followed by the first full-shell motorsport seat (the “RECARO Profi”) in 1974. The company also expanded into aircraft seating from 1972 (building initially under license), merged with seat maker Keiper in 1983 to form Keiper RECARO, and reorganized into the Keiper RECARO Group in 1997 with separate automotive and aircraft-seat divisions. RECARO’s automotive seating business was sold to Johnson Controls in 2011–2012, while RECARO Aircraft Seating and RECARO Automotive (racing/performance seats) continued as related but distinct entities.
What We Could Not Verify
- We did not find a primary RECARO source describing RECARO Japan or RECARO Automotive Japan’s own corporate history; our sources cover the German parent company’s timeline, not the Japanese distribution/manufacturing arm specifically.
- Some secondary sources give 1969 as a year the company was sold to a Keiper/Huber & Wagner/Metzeler group, which sits awkwardly next to the 1983 Keiper merger date given on RECARO’s own heritage page; we have not resolved this into a single timeline.
Spotted in the Wild
This profile was prompted by a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X Final Edition that came through our stock fitted with RECARO leather-combination seats, alongside its factory BBS forged 18-inch wheels. As with all of our “as described” vehicle write-ups, the seat model is reported as described by the seller rather than independently verified by us.
Sources: RECARO official heritage/milestones page (recaro.com); English Wikipedia “Recaro” article, citing Hemmings Daily and other period automotive-history coverage.