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So, I've been planning out swapping my seat covers pretty much ever since I acquired my 2008 a few years ago to get rid of the cracking that the factory leather has been doing. I finally pulled the trigger on them a few months ago and I thought I'd offer up some thoughts and pictures of the finished product.
My plan was always to buy the covers and have them shipped to my uncle in PA (I'm in GA), who is a well regarded upholsterer in British car circles. First question, why not have him build the covers for me. Well, he's getting near retirement and without the car there it would be impossible and take weeks for him to do. Plus, his cost would be much more than what Gerry at ACL charges for the covers.
I started speaking with Gerry at ACL back in June and he answered all my questions quickly and professionally. I paypaled him the money on June 24th, his lead time at that time was 2-3 weeks. It ended up taking slightly longer, but I'd allowed for this, so it wasn't a big deal. If you're working on a schedule, give him some flexibility in your schedule, its worth it for the product delivered if it takes slightly longer.
The covers shipped and I got word back that they arrived and looked, to use my uncles words, really really good. He told me the workmanship was really nice and the leather seemed like it was high quality.
On to the install. I took the week off and headed up to PA so that we could knock these things out. We started at 4am (uncle works odd hours when he can get the most done before people start coming in the door) and finished up at about 3:30 pm. With two of us (On experienced) it took almost 12 hours of work. Granted, we weren't in a huge hurry. The install went pretty smooth, but there are some things you'll need to pay attention to.
Make sure to pull the old wires out of the factory seats, you'll need to reuse these with the new covers. These are the wires that you hog-ring down to the foam that holds the cover in place.
You will need to trim the plastic attachments to match how the factory is trimmed. You can do this with sidecutters.
Pay attention to how things come apart, you'll need to make sure that your airbag wires go back in the way they came out and the large clips that hold the strap around the airbag. (From what we figured, this is what directs the airbag in the correct direction when it deploys.)
The headrest covers slip over the factory covers. You cannot really take the factory covers apart, they are injection molded.
The only small problem we encountered was some stitching on one cover that wasn't quite finished properly and was a little loose. Fixed in about 10 seconds with a needle and some thread. Just a small error in the sewing which wasn't a big deal and could have probably been left as is, but my uncle is a bit of a perfectionist so he took care of it.
I'm sure other cars do it too, but my center console foam had completely turned to black goo. You'll want to scrape it off and clean it up with some chemicals and glue some 1/4" foam down to reconstruct the console like factory.
One other thing we did that I forgot in the first post. We rebuilt some of the foam on the lower seat cushion where it'd been worn out from use. Just a layer on either side glued to the factory foam brought it back up to where it should have been,
As for cost, the best thing I can recommend is to contact Jerry through his facebook page. There were some things I had him leave out (Such as the install tools he usually includes with the covers) and the covers didn't have to ship very far...and they were completely stock colors with same color stitching and not some wild combination (from what I've been told, he'll do just about any color combination you want). My cost for the covers was $1000 shipped...as for labor, who knows. If you're near Indiana, PA I'm sure my uncle would be willing to do them for you, but I have no clue what he'd charge since it would probably take him 2 days working by himself. Any other shop, figure 6-8 hours of their labor unless they have a big crew on hand, but upholstery is a dying art and good shops are very hard to come by these days.
