China's Seres patents groundbreaking in-car toilet design

There’s plenty of new technology in cars these days designed to make our lives easier, such as hands-free boot opening or autonomous self-parking. But Chinese firm Seres is taking things to a whole new level, with plans for – wait for it – an in-car toilet.

Yes, you read that correctly… a toilet, inside the actual car. Patent filings from China show an on-board toilet ‘hidden under the seat when not in use’ that can slide out from underneath the passenger’s seat either physically or through the car’s voice-recognition system. 

The patent is solely for the passenger’s side, so there’s no chance of using the facilities whilst driving. And it’s not clear whether only top-spec versions of Seres models would benefit, or if the feature would be introduced to bog-standard variants, too.

The toilet also gets a fan and a pipe to help send odours out of the car and while the patent claims waste goes into a storage box inside the vehicle – rather than just dispensed on to the road – there’s also a ‘rotatable heating rod’ to help destroy it. 

In-vehicle toilets are pretty common in vehicles like motorhomes or coaches, but they’ve rarely appeared in cars. In the 1950s, American business tycoon Joseph J Mascuch commissioned renowned coachbuilder Alfredo Vignale to modify a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith with a gold-plated toilet under the rear seat which doubled as a champagne cooler. 

Chinese cars typically get more equipment as standard, as seen by the likes of a panoramic sunroof fitted to the tiny Leapmotor T03 and a refrigerator in the new Denza Z9GT. But Seres is clearly willing to go to extremes in an effort to stand out. 

Over in China, Seres offers mainly SUVs such as the Seres 5 and the Seres 3, the latter of which was confirmed for the UK back in 2024.

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