Seems the "commander" series of mounts were originally intended to carry a passenger

[Vorgulremik]

I did a search but couldn't find a topic where anyone had mentioned this before, on closer inspection of the Korrealis Commander mount from the DDE vendor, and the Korrealis Baron from valor rank 65, it seems this mount series was originally intended to carry two people.

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m...1_689017-1.jpg

Here we can see through moving the camera through the front grill of the model, that the second seat is present within the mount already, but has been concealed by a low-polygon "patch", which at a glance does hide the fact the second seat is even there, but if you look closely at the above image, and the image below, the seam can clearly be seen.

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m...9_852768-1.jpg

Here you can also see part of the seat from the passenger side poking through the "patch" which has been applied over the passenger side of the mount.

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m..._06_625871.jpg

So was this a feature which was removed for any specific reason, or is this "second seat" planned to become usable any time in the near future ?, I think a lot of people would agree that the overall aesthetic of the mounts would be much improved if the passenger side of the cockpit were to be opened, even if it was initially unusable.

[OhpUldum]

Chances are it was only ever designed to be a single person mount however the Dev's probably figured it was better to cover up the second seat so they weren't hounded with thousands of people asking why their mount shows two seats but only one person can ride.

[Tradewind]

Was meant to hold your companion, but they couldn't get it to look quite right.

[Tore]

During beta a lot of people asked for two-seat mounts so that your companion could ride with you and continue to provide flavor dialog. They tried but said they would have to leave that development for later as they were unable to get it to work properly before launch. It would seem that this mount was originally intended to hold 2 people (or 1 + companion) but after cutting that bit of development they simply covered it up.