While most automakers are busy adding giant touchscreens and mood lighting to their EV interiors, one Chinese car company has decided the future of mobility might involve taking a dump without ever leaving the driver’s seat.
No, we’re not kidding.
Seres, the company behind Aito vehicles, has officially received a utility model patent for what it describes as an “in vehicle toilet,” according to Autoblog. The patent was filed on April 22, 2025, approved on April 10, 2026, and is currently active.
Basically, the toilet lives underneath a seat and slides out on rails when needed. Think less porcelain throne and more secret bathroom drawer hiding in your EV floorpan like some cursed IKEA accessory.
When it’s not in use, it slides neatly back under the seat, which means the cabin keeps its normal layout and space. That’s actually the clever part. Modern EV packaging is brutally tight because battery packs eat up most of the underfloor real estate. Finding room for anything extra is difficult enough. Finding room for a toilet is the kind of sentence nobody expected to hear in automotive engineering meetings.
The patent attempts to solve that by turning otherwise unused cabin space into a deployable emergency restroom.
Which raises several horrifyingly practical questions, like: Where exactly does everything go afterward? How’s wastewater stored in a cramped electric vehicle chassis? How good are the seals?
And perhaps most importantly, what happens if somebody drops a tactical level fart bomb inside a silent EV with the windows up?
Because unlike an RV bathroom, this isn’t separated from the passengers by walls, doors, or dignity.
Imagine sitting in traffic while your friend casually pulls a toilet out from under the passenger seat like they’re opening a glovebox. Imagine the eye contact. Imagine the sounds. Imagine realizing your luxury EV now smells like sadness and gas station burritos.
Even if the engineering works perfectly, the psychological hurdle might be impossible to overcome.
Still, there’s a legitimate use case buried underneath all the comedy. Long distance travel, medical needs, accessibility situations, or emergencies could make something like this genuinely useful for some drivers. And to be fair, portable toilets already exist for vehicles. Seres is simply trying to integrate the idea directly into the cabin instead of tossing a camping toilet in the trunk and pretending it’s classy.
Like most automotive patents, there’s no guarantee this thing will ever make production. Plenty of ideas get patented and quietly disappear forever once reality, cost, or basic human shame enters the equation.
For now, the slide-out toilet seat sits in that magical automotive gray area between innovative engineering and WTF were they thinking?!?!
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