I briefly had a new Porsche 718 Boxster GTS 4.0 in white for the weekend and I was reminded that Porsche still has the one feature that I rarely see on any car. A feature so great and so useful that it should honestly be the norm on every vehicle offered for sale. Why is that? I’m not sure, maybe Porsche has a patent on it, but it seems unlikely.
Part of being an automotive journalist is that you get cars to borrow and, admittedly, some of the features can kind of blur together. Every car has some sort of wireless charging mat these days, for instance, and the ones that stand out usually only do so because they’re truly awful or inspired (The Cadillac Escalade has a little pocket your phone goes into, which is obviously a great solution).
When it comes to seats, the highly optioned cars we usually get come in one of three flavors, usually:
- Seats that neither heat your body nor cool it.
- Seats that heat your body but refuse to cool it, due to a lack of ventilation.
- Seats that will either heat your body OR cool it, but not both at the same time.
Being from Texas, I do sometimes get passengers who are shocked that I drive with the seat heaters on basically full-time in every car I drive, including my own. I’m just as likely to do this in the frigid, snot-frozen-to-my-nose January mornings as I am on sweltering, crack-flowing-like-the-Mississippi June afternoons. I am an extremely poor athlete, and my sport of choice is Ultimate Frisbee, so I spend a decent amount of time with pain somewhere in my body. Because I get this pain playing a sport that people often confuse with Frisbee Golf, it’s not like you can garner any sympathy by complaining about it, so I use the heater as a kind of back relaxer.
Seat cooling, I’m less interested in. The most powerful ones make it feel like a powerful, icy gale being shot straight into the South Pole, if you get my meaning. I’m not averse to this sensation, and no judgment if that’s your thing, but it’s not something I usually find pleasurable. If I’m particularly overheated for a few minutes, I will turn on the seat coolers to chill the chair, but I can’t leave them on for long.
I think it was a 997.2 Carrera S back in 2010 that I first experienced something truly remarkable. Life-affirming even. I was on a trip with my wife, and I instinctively turned on the seat heater and she, being less inclined towards warm weather in spite of our similar upbringing, immediately turned on the seat cooling. As a joke, I turned on my seat cooler as well, not expecting it to work.
It did. Both worked!
This shouldn’t be a shock, right? As reported here previously, the seats in a car are heated via conductive wire.
The cooling in seats, typically, is done via ventilation. Basically, the car pushes your car’s air-conditioned air (if it’s on) via the seats themselves. In the Porsche, the car itself actually sucks air into the holes, not out. 
Photo: authorSince one is heated via a coil and one is cooled via ventilation, there’s no reason why both of these things can’t work in concert, right? It’s not like a thunderstorm is going to form over your abdomen as the two air masses clash. I studied meteorology in college, and I’m at least 45% sure that’s not how that works.
And, yet, most automakers don’t allow you to run both at the same time. It’s either/or. You get to be hot or you get to be cold. This makes a sort of sense. Why would you want to be both?
I’ll tell you my friends. The downside of running the seat heater all the time is that I’m a human, and I sweat. On a warm day, it can get swampy rather quickly. No one likes getting out of a car looking like the runner-up on Wipeout. Even on a cooler day, if the heater is running and you’re doing it long enough, a little sweat may form in a non-ideal place (like the back of a VW?).
By running the heater and the air through the seats, you get both the benefits of heat and the ability to keep yourself from getting sweaty. But don’t run them both full tilt like a Peterbilt. Here’s what that looks like:
This is absolutely GOAT mode. This should just be one button for when you want to feel the warm embrace of a chair and keep it as dry as Dorothy Parker.
And in a convertible? Life doesn’t get much better.
A full review of the car is coming, but from two people who have a way better sense of the car than I ever will. Will they talk about the seats? I hope so. It’s not the best part of the car, but it’s the best feature that every car could have (not every car can get a mid-mounted flat-six, though I’d also support that).
The first car I had with heated seats was a 2001 Jetta. Well, that’s not true. My first two cars had vinyl seats, and they got excruciatingly hot in the summer sun. I got in the practice of laying down a towel if I was wearing shorts.
The VW’s independent dials went from 0 to 5. And 5 was “let’s bake some bread” hot.
They got a lot warmer than my now ex-wife’s BMW X5. She actually noticed that, while we were dating.
The Accord that replaced the VW has low and high. Low is barely noticeable and high is “meh, warm enough, I guess.”
The “former we” replaced the BMW with an Acura MDX that had both seat heaters and cooling. Heating was adequate. The cooling seemed like it was sucking air through the perforated leather, but in swampy SE TX, about the only thing I noticed was it made noise that was audible at stop lights.
That does seem nice and a great example of why just letting the user decide how something functions is often best. But I’ll also use this space to complain about how I don’t understand how any cars today with leather/vinyl seats can come without ventilation, but it’s still not universal, especially in non-luxury brands.
This, right here- make me buy the leather seats in anything but the base model and then make me sit in a pool of my own sweat……
“Perforated material plus adding ducting is going to cost $1.50 more per vehicle, we cant possibly make this affordable for the customer”
City boy.
My Mercedes does this too, as a swampy man who sometimes like the hot relaxing back massage, it’s a godsend.
Every so often my wife asks me to take her for a ride just so she can use the seat heater. Therapy for her sore back. I had a Challenger with ventilated seats. It was just a fan that moved ambient air through the seats. Nice enough. I had a Mustang with true A/C seats. I loved them so, living in the South.
Somehow, ignorantly, I had no idea other people also used seat heaters therapeutically. Decades of hard labor mean that I’m extremely grateful for a car with robust heated seats. Good to have you on board. ????
My new Maverick has heated seats that I do in fact use for soreness, as I did in my previous ride- a Silverado. The big difference however is in how the heaters are controlled. The Silverado was far superior in this regard: I could run just the seat back heater, allowing me to soothe aches without swamping out.
Unfortunately, my Bolt is all-or-nothing like the Mav. So it’s not just a Chevy thing.
Yes. And there are days when I get back to my car, that’s been parked in a lot, out in the sun, that sinking into a warm seat really does feel good on my deteriorating spine.
Our 2025 Audi Q5 does this as well. I discovered it by accident.
I’d say Porsche still offers it because they beat Stellantis on being cheap and not updating anything. So leave it as the go to. Frankly I can generate enough heat and sweat lower extremities at 20 below with the windows open while drinking a soda with ice.
YOU JUST REFERENCED MY FAVORITE KEVIN SMITH MOVIE AND THAT’S WHY I KEEP COMING BACK HERE.
(sorry for getting excited, I thought I saw Walt Flanagan)
It’s really the only Kevin Smith movie that still holds up, with the possible exception of the original Clerks. THAT KID IS BACK ON THE ESCALATOR AGAIN!
Don’t forget Dogma – my choice for best Kevin Smith movie.
Wouldn’t Clerks have been a better reference with the whole Porsche sucking the air thing- I’m thinking missed opportunity for the “37”. Or maybe a MegaMaid reference.
She’s going from suck….to blow!
So here’s where we find out how much of an overlap exists on the Venn diagram of autopian readers and Kevin Smith fans. I’m here for it.
This made me so excited to read. I love this site.
I’m going to confess my ignorance and hopefully get a recommendation for a must-see movie. I did see Clerks.
Mallrats.
After Clerks immediately watch Mallrats then watch Dogma. Then you can go back and check out Chasing Amy and all the sequels and reboots but those first 3 are the main ones.
I’ve got these seats in my 718 and it never occurred to me to try to operate both simultaneously. For me, all this is overshadowed by learning that my fears about pulling my stanky sweat into my upholstery are true! Someone talk me down from the ledge on that, please, so I can enjoy those seats again this summer.
I can explain why GM Heated and Cooled seats (at least on the 2006-2011 G/H platform) will only allow you to do one or the other but not both: it uses 2 Thermoelectric Devices (TEDs) built into the blower assemblies. (one for the seat back, one for the cushion) whichever mode is active is routed through the seat covers, while the other is dumped into the cabin.
Loved this in my Canyon
BMW X5s (and likely other models) can do this too.
It’s the perfect swamp ass fix for those who want warmth on their backs.
You can do this on any VAG car as far as I know. Audi does it, VW does it, and Porsche does too. The issue is that the seat ventilation options always literally and figuratively SUCK. Never have I thought they were good at doing the ventilation, because as stated in the article, the ventilation goes reverse of what it should. The seat sucks air from the vents rather than blows air out of them. I don’t find that to be particularly helpful in hot weather.
Also, yeah, I run my seat heaters in about 90% of situations because my back is effed to hell.
That’s why I love the “Back Only” mode that GM has; when my back is sore after a hard day at work, I jump into my Lucerne and turn on the seat back heater and it soothes my back!
“Back only mode” is probably how the workers at the GM plant lift everything.
I always thought Lucernes looked nice. Never been in one. My in-laws had a supercharged Park Avenue, and it was a very pleasant car to waft around in. I imagine the Lucerne is as well.
Note to all. Never use the ventilated seats on a rental car. Too many people make bad choices on what to eat when they are on travel and you don’t want that verified when proof of this is blown out of the vent holes under the driver’s seat.
Just visualising this situation gives me shivers
It only matters if you can’t out perform the previous renters. Al Bundy 4/7/97 Al and the family rent a cheap car .
I also note that almost all leather seats are black, especially in rentals. Nothing like sitting in a black leather seat in Florida, turning on the seat vents only to be force fed a smell that my younger self called ” Schwapah.” It was flashbacks to walking into Junior High boys locker rooms for gym. I instantly started fearing a wedgie and craving really bad cheese pizza.
The worse part of that experience is to realize who was responsible for the “Schwapah”. It appears that being an overweight dude waddling around Florida on a 95/95 day mass produces it.
Noted. I don’t know if I’ve ever rented a car ritzy enough to have ventilated seats.
My last rental, a Corolla, had a switchblade key like my old (2001) Jetta. My DD (and most of my more recent rentals) has a fob and a push-to-start button, and I was like, what?
It was almost show a kid a rotary dial phone and have him call a parent level of confusion for a second. I was going to say call home, but nobody (besides my mom) has a home phone anymore.
My company has Emerald Aisle access for us. I highly recommend, although it can be a disappointment (last trip I took, I few into Tampa, Every vehicle in the lot to pick from was a Voyager or a Pacifica, all in white).
The vehicle I got once was a Charger SXT. I can’t figure out if the previous driver was an Indian that liked Mexican food or Visa Versa. Either way, mistakes were made and I learned to never use ventilated seats on a rental.
I’m retired now, but we also had Emerald Aisle with National and it was great.
Being a Porsche, I’m guessing the seat heater option is $3k, the ventilation system is $2k, but if you pick both at once, they will give you a special deal of $7k for the pair.
If it was a BMW they’d want you to pay $160/year to use the feature
But if you don’t want heated or ventilated seats that’s an extra $10k somehow.
Not car related.
Buuutttt
Ultimate frisbee is the Ultimate sport.
Desperately wanting it to take over the boring sports like track (Field is still cool) soccer, baseball, and dangerous sports like football. Basketball is cool, but nothing compared to a sport where you have like 8 seconds to chase the disc in the air cool.
Not a sport but they are athletes
blasphemy
I loved playing Ultimate, but . . . you know when you square off against the other team in a pick up game, you generally align folks with similar speed. I was always the slowest, and inevitably the first goaround they would line up their speedster with me. I was much better at taking pictures of the players and games.
When I used to play it seemed like most of the other players were smokers, of both legal and illicit (at the time) stuff. It was at times funny and other times alarming when someone was coughing up a lung.
Yet another feature where saab was ahead of it’s time
How so? I had an ’88 9000 Turbo. It did have leather, but it’s been so long ago I don’t remember whether it had seat heaters or not.
I was exaggerating a little but this is a feature my 2004 9-5 had. My 2001 9-5 on the other hand just had heat, but the 2004 was the luxury Arc trim that didn’t exist in 2001.
My 83 900S had seat heaters, but cloth seats instead of leather.
Best of both worlds!
I live in an area where it can snow for 5 months out of the year, and although I’ve owned several cars with heated seats, I’ve never used them. By the time the seats heat up, I am warm enough, and I have no desire to just sweat on my backside.
Because the airflow from cooling seats is immediate, I find them much more usable.
I also live somewhere it can snow for 6 months out of the year. We got out first car with seat heaters. It’s pointless. It’s not nearly fast enough.
You must have gotten a subaru! Those things are terrible! A good seat heater will roast you in a matter of 1-2 minutes. Typically they are german.
Honda.
Go try an early 2010s Mazda 3 or Ford Focus with cloth seats. At full power in -30 temps from a cold start it’s literally unbearably hot in 3 minutes.
I loved those seat heaters
I had a Mazda 3 and would relax if I got home late out in the driveway with the seat heater blasting (and the only settings were either off or scald), the air conditioning on full blast and the radio set to “Blues Before Sunrise”.
My 2022 Mazda 3 is like that. Heated wheel is also as toasty as it gets in like 30 seconds, if that.
Heated wheel. That is a great point, completely missing in this discussion. I thought it was stupid until I drove a car with it in the winter. My current car doesn’t have it, and I miss it.
I was going to say, I remember other, older, vehicles (not mine) being much better. I wonder if some sort of regulation makes them not work as well as they used to.
I think maybe it was self-regulation. I recall some lawsuits happening in the early 2000s where some people with reduced feeling in their limbs got burned by seat heaters that were accidentally turned on. They sued the auto manufacturers and won. Before those suits, the heaters in Audi and VW tended to have a rotary dial that went from 1-5 and stayed on indefinitely until you turned it off yourself. Now, every seat heater I’ve ever encountered is electronically operated and usually dials back the temperature from say “setting 3” to “setting 2” automatically. It’s kind of infuriating but I guess I get the issue.
Yes, I seem to recall my wifes MK4 Jetta having great seat heaters. And it was on a dial.
Leather seats?
Subaru?
Both seem to make heaters ineffective. Heated cloth seats or any other brand will roast you out!
I have that, in a Honda. They DO get really warm, but it takes a while.
My main use of heated seats was to extend the electric range on my PHEV because the electric heat seemed like it took 1 mile range per degree rise in the cabin temperature.
Heated steering wheel is actually the luxury item though – it heats faster than the seats and I will probably keep my jacket on unless I am going pretty far but being able to take my gloves off right away is nice.
Interesting — I always like heated seats because they’re warm in 1-2 minutes, but the cabin heat can take 5+ minutes (even in relatively mild Alabama winters).
Between the two, though, I’d take cooled. Because of the anything-but-mild Alabama summers.
I doubt I would turn on the heat more than a couple of days a year in Alabama. I leave windows open until the temperature gets below freezing.
When it is cold enough for me to care about heated seats, I am going to have on a jacket and gloves anyway, and those keep the heated interior bits from making much of a difference.
I lived in Alabama for years. There’s a week or two each year that is shockingly cold and completely unexpected if you don’t live there.
I grew up in the Washington DC area, and I had more sub 10 deg F weather in Alabama than DC.
The weather pattern in winter there is warm nice days for a week, Rains like hell for 24 hours, gets Ohio cold for a couple days, slow warm up for a week, then repeat. Occasionally, there is winter weather during the transition from warm to cold. This is predicted for every storm, so it’s hard to find milk, bread and eggs in the store all winter long.
On those cold days after a storm comes through, the weather is similar to one of those Ohio days where “it’s too cold to snow” with lows in the low teens or single digits, a lot of wind to make the wind-chills sub-freezing and highs below Freezing.
It’s nothing like Minnesota cold of course, but when I first moved to Alabama, I was shocked to find cold days.at all.
LOL, sounds about right. While the norm is “clear and cool and 45-50” during the day, we usually see a couple mornings of single digits and at least one snow/ice day each year. It’s my favorite time of the year, but without a garage, I use those seat heaters every day for about 3-4 months of the year. The plus side is NOT having to put on heavy winter clothes, so it works both ways…but I get it — I make fun of steering wheel heaters because gloves do a better job, but to each their own.
The US has such a wide variety of weather, it’s a miracle they can even make cars for all of us as a monolithic market.
It is all relative, of course. My father-in-law worked in the northern Minnesota Iron mines and would be working in the bottom of the pit when the temperatures at surface level were -25º and the bottom of the pit was -35º or lower. The bottom of the pit got even less sun, and all the cold air would sink and not get blown away. They recorded temps lower than -50º. The ice on his favorite fishing lake wouldn’t be gone until almost June.
Even in central Minnesota and Wisconsin, I have lots of memories of starting a drive and the tires not being round for the first couple of miles.
Yeah, my wife is from Northern Maine. We have the policy that any place that has outlets in the parking lot to keep the block and battery heaters running is a great place to be “FROM”.
With that being said, it’s shocking to move to Alabama and find out you need more than a wind breaker. I had a group of customers come down to Alabama from Tornoto that ended up going off to get winter coats because they didn’t think to pack any.
The weirdest one I saw was when I was in New Orleans in January. It dropped down to the 20s and snowed a tiny bit. That city was not ready for that weather. The big problem wasn’t the roads, but that the water piping was far too close to the ground and there were water main breaks all over the place as a result.
We are “FROM” the self-proclaimed “ice-box of the nation” (International Falls, MN), and moved to the interior of Alaska. Everything is relative, but Minnesota felt balmy compared to what we see here (love our combo heat/ventilated seats in the Touareg).
I still recall a job we had in Alabama in 2018. It was January. +9 degrees F and snow. We showed up at the customer site at 7:30AM. No one was there except the hourly operator crew. We started our assessment of their operation, only to be called by my contact at 10:30 telling us that we shouldn’t try to come in that day. I guess it’s all relative.
What’s interesting is that each company has a different policy for weather too. I worked for over 20 years for a company who’s policy was “show up or use vacation”. Only time that we bent is for when they didn’t have power for a week, so people that did mainly computer work (like me) were allowed to charge half time to a special weather related job until they could source a generator to get the servers running again. That was in Alabama and I drove on more rough winter roads over those years than I did when I lived in PA, because they never do proper prep and all it takes is a 1/8″ of ice on the road to make it “interesting,” especially when nobody around you has a clue.
Then I went to Washington State to work for a major company at Hanford. We had to download an app and install it on our phone for emergencies. I did and ignored it. I was halfway to work on a snowy day with the roads being very passable (had been plowed) and my app tells me that I shouldn’t be coming in, too dangerous. Another day, I’m at work and the boss comes around and tells us to go home now because it’s too windy. Wouldn’t even let me finish an e-mail I was working on. (yeah it was windy, 75+ mph gusts, but having me drive across a bridge in a car instead of sitting in a cube in the middle of a concrete building didn’t sound safer to me). It’s just the culture there of better safe than sorry.
My current company strongly encourages us to WFH in there is any change of bad weather. It’s a logical thing. Why drive on roads that might or might not be safe if WFH is an option?
Sounds like a lot of regional and corporate culture differences. Here in Alaska, my daughters would get an excused absence if they did not show up for school when the temperature was less than -40. I never heard of any student, ever, using this excuse (and we had probably 30 days/year where this could apply). Not even the slackers would use it. School bus ride was 25 miles each way, and in their 8 years at school here, I don’t think the bus missed a single day.
My wife works for a National Park where the rule is that you can WFH if you feel it is unsafe to come in at their discretion. The vast majority of the employees do not use it, but there are a few that do.
Corporate cultures are changing. Safety is no longer an afterthought. Covid changed what companies and schools realized could be accomplished from home.
My dad taught me several rules for driving on slick roads. #1 was DON’T. If you don’t have to drive on a slick road, just don’t drive.
Another thing that has changed is our workforce. Today’s work force is aging and a LOT of them are dang near impossible to replace. Having a 60+ year old shoveling his driveway or trying to fight his way to work on slick roads is a waste of time for a valuable resource. It’s also a stupid risk to take. What if that “unicorn” employee has a heart attack shoveling snow or gets in a bad accident?
Now maybe you lose a bit of productivity from him/her working from home. Fine, but compare that to the fact they will show up an hour late and spend at least an hour sharing “I remember 1993 when the roads were worse” with other old farts then leave early before the roads ice back up. You are miles ahead if you require them to WFH.
Yes, there are some workers that HAVE to work on site. But many of these workers are going to be non-productive because of weather anyway, unless you live in a place that can handle a winter weather without a single problem (like you do).
Oh and it doesn’t have to be winter weather to tell people to WFH. I was in LA and they got hit by a large rain storm. Several people didn’t make it to work because of flooding and one ended up losing a car trying to cross a road that didn’t look that deep. I’m sure if you got what I would call an average summer day here, the resulting thaw would cause all sorts of misadventures for you do to overheating of everything.
These events are rare, take the hit in productivity, keep everyone safe to avoid a bigger hit in productivity and trust you won’t see another epic rain storm in City LA, snow in the State of LA or 90+ deg weather in AK for a while (I was SO closed. Damn Alabama ruined a good symmetry there).
I used to not be a huge fan of heated seats too – until I got a car with an “Auto” setting. It starts off at full tilt then gradually reduces the heat as you drive along, which reduces the suddenly-roasting effect quite considerably.
I actually haven’t found the ventilated seats in my car all that useful yet, though I can see a use case for them on a hot day when the car’s been in the sun.
I have the Occupant Comfort setting checked in my Mazda 3. It will adjust the heated seats/wheel based on cabin temp to match whatever you have the climate control set to. I can remote start it and have toasty seats and a warm wheel waiting for me. It’s glorious.
My BMWs will roast your butt by the end of the driveway. Fingers too, with the heated steering wheels. So will Volvos and Saabs and VWs. Did you have a Subaru? They have the most useless seat heaters ever made by man. Second are GM products in my experience. Yeah, nice to be able to heat just the back, but why does it take 10 minutes to feel anything?
What they also need to go with the heated steering wheel is a heated shift knob. Takes forever for that damned thing to warm up on a frigid Maine day, and taking your hand off the nice heated wheel to shift sucks.
Ha! Shift knob. We’re all such wusses now.
I freely admit to being quite spoiled in my advancing middle age. Though I mostly solved the problem by wintering in Florida.
I’ve had heated seats in a BMW (old, so might not be representative), Honda/Acura, Mazda, Toyota, Ford, Jeep, VW. Maybe more, but I have never found them useful, so which has them doesn’t really stick. The VW had the seats that got hottest the fastest and would get to the highest temperature. I still didn’t find them very useful.
I admit that, having grown up in a place where it is quite cold, I have a high tolerance to cold to begin with. The heat in my house won’t kick in until it hits 62º during the day and 58º at night. Not for saving money, it’s just where I am comfortable.
The big thing is that when it is cold enough for me to want heat fairly quickly (for me, that is around 20º or lower), I am dressed for the weather with a decent jacket, hat, and gloves, so the heat from the seat or wheel is fighting that insulation. By the time it makes a meaningful difference, the car’s interior has become tolerable.
To each their own. I won’t have a car without them, even here in Florida, and have added them to a number of cars that didn’t come with them. At my place in Maine, I like NOT having to wear a coat in the car, and heated seats are a lot of the reason for that. No reason to wear a coat just to go from heated building to heated car, a wool sweater is plenty. Plus there is nothing better on a sore back.
I am fortunate not to have a bad back, but my partner does, and they like heated seats for that reason.
There is a Simspons clip for nearly anything:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccdfxs5fluk&ab_channel=MarcFischer
I know I will have made it in life when I have cooled seats.
My wife insisted on only 2 things for her Mom mobile. Hands free liftgate and ventilated seats. They’ve both been great, but I could skip the liftgate. Ventilated seats have been great in southern CA. I rarely use heated seats. I’d take ventilated over heated seats by a huge margin, I wish it was the norm.
I thought I was alone in this. I hate how slow they are. What is your gripe?
I can just press it. It’s a cool feature, but improves my quality of life minimally. No matter how full my hands have been they’ve never been unable to press the button. I’d rather just hit the remote en route so it’s already open when I get to the car.
They are slow too 🙂
OH HANDS free. You mean not even to push a button? I thought you just meant power liftgate; no hnads required to open or close it. No hands to push it down. Not no hands to activate it.
I don’t even have a power liftgate. Maybe habits would change, but, they’re too damn slow.
yeah, current gen KIA Sorento. You stand behind it for 3 seconds while its locked and it opens, but yeah, thats plenty of time to just hit the button. I’ve seen other cars that you wave your feet under, but they don’t seem any faster.
Ah yes. I love standing with my hands full of shit for 3 seconds then waiting 5 more seconds for it to open. Such convenience. If time is money, then this is a waste of money which seems to point to it not actually being convenient if it costs you more money.
The biggest PITA about Smart Trunk on my Forte GT is that it desperately wants to open the trunk whenever the key fob is anywhere nearby. Even unlocking the doors doesn’t help, as the car will lock the doors again automatically and reactivate Smart Trunk. I’ve taken to leaving the fob inside the house when I wash it to keep this from happening and using the app to unlock it when I get to the interior. It’s a good idea and more useful than not but the execution is a bit annoying.
If our car locked itself to trigger the hands free liftgate I’d have a meltdown.
My gripe with the kick to open hatch is that my car has tried to eat me by closing while I am reaching into the front of the cargo area more times than I have actually wanted to use it to open or close the hatch. Much rather use the remote or the buttons on the hatch which are much harder to accidently activate.
I’m totally an idiot. I didn’t put two and two together that hands free meant not needing to push a button. Hands free to me meant opens and closes via power. I forgot those kick to open things existed and would never buy one. We still haven’t perfected motion sensor faucets, as you’ve described, the last thing we need is a 100 pound door closing on people with torquey electric motors pulling it closed.
I don’t even like power liftgates. They’re slow.
I’ve lost count of the number of times that stupid thing has been accidentally activated when I’ve been getting my dog in or out of the SUV. I f-ing hate it. Any vehicle with the stupid kick motion sensor should also have a setting to disable it. Toyota added it to the new 4Runners, and I’m just why? WTF Toyota? This was never needed on a 4Runner. I’m waiting on mine to arrive and hoping they have a disable setting for it.
My wife and I don’t have kids which means the dogs get loaded in the back seat so that hasn’t been a problem. We do have a Canvasback cargo area cover with a bumper protection flap and I swear it closes the hatch 20% of the time and its always when loading something large or heavy. This may be what finally gets me to buy or subscribe to OBDeleven or one of the other programming options.
I remember when people said that about heated seats…now it’s almost hard to find a car without them (middle trims or higher, at least)
I got my first car with ventilated seats a few months ago and I can’t shut the fuck up about them. They were actually something of a factor in the purchase as nothing else in my modest price range came equipped with them. I’m like a pampered middle eastern potentate looking down on the sweaty-backed masses. I’m ashamed of myself for thinking that my prior heated-only seats were suitable for my station in life.
what car? this is literally a selling point here in the south. If I don’t have to buy the highest trim imaginable to get them I’d consider something completely different.
SW Florida here, so the ventilated seats were definitely a selling point. ’24 Kia Forte GT with the GT2 package. It is actually the highest trim level (and the only way to get ventilated seats) but the Kia dealer in Ft. Lauderdale was pretty motivated to clear out their leftover ’24s and I walked out with a quick, sporty, extremely well-equipped little car for around $26k. The other cars in that range I was looking at (Mazda3, Civic, even the K4) couldn’t touch it for features and performance.
That could be the cheapest car with ventilated seats on the market- great fun commuter too….. That’s a good pickup and deal. That GT scoots with 200hp in a light car.
Most seat “coolers” are now just ventilation of ambient air, so IMO being able to run both at once makes perfect sense, just like opening the windows on a mildly warm spring day. Airflow and warmth. And on a hot day, it’s the equivelent of a ceiling fan inside an air conditioned room — it just enhances the cool.
Earlier versions of seat ventilation (I believe) were actual A/C vents that piped into your nether regions, which is a far more luxurious idea…but overly complex.
Not in the Cadillac DTS and Buick Lucerne: they have a pair of Thermoelectric Devices built into the seat blower assemblies made by Amerigon (now Gentherm Inc.)
I had to read this, because based on the article I assumed the article was going to be about seat cooling, which generally seems to be less common on vehicles. And I thought “Well, I have seat cooling, I’ll read how rare it is”.
I was not expecting to read that both can run at the same time. In my Lexus, both are fan driven, so its really just controlling the temperature (red/heat to the left and blue/cold to the right) and speed of the fan the same knob, with center being ‘off’. So the further you go from center the faster the fan spins and the hotter or colder its gets.
But both at the same time? That’s genius.
I assume they might share some parts and engineering as distant VAG cousins but I was amused to find that my ’21 A6 allroad will do the same thing. It is my first car with ventilated seats so I didn’t realize this was a rare combination.
Is the seat ventilation actually part of the AC system? Is the compressor running when you have the ventilation on?
Or is it like most cars where it’s just a fan, circulating air?
Pretty sure Porsche and Audi are both ventilated in that they are just pulling ambient air into the seats.
Some have a cold plate (like in a portable cooler) they pull the air over that cools it further.
That would be really excessive – the ventilation works great as it is – however I am not dealing with Texas heat.
I don’t even think the ability to have heat and ventilation in the seats makes the top 5 of the excessive features in my car though – do I really need a nightvision/infrared view of the road between the speedo and tach?
I once got a ride in an Audi with the nightvision thing through Princeton, NJ at night. The number of deer that you could see via that vs. via your eyes was *staggering*. And somewhat terrifying, to be honest. So I can see a use for it in those environments.
It is definitely cool but it just feels too much like a gimmick because it’s too low for heads up driving and hard to keep an eye on it and the road. I am in suburban Essex County, NJ and it has definitely flagged people on the sidewalk and getting in and out of parallel parked cars but so far never when I didn’t already see them. It is the kind of feature though if it works one time it could be a big deal so we will see how I feel about it when I have put 100k miles on it not 4K.
It is shocking how many deer are in NJ – I grew up in rural Iowa and I see easily twice as many deer while driving in NJ but they are so much more chill about roads than Iowa deer.
I assume much of the issue with suburban NJ is that there aren’t many hunters (or places where hunting is allowed. At that point the main predator of deer is vehicles.
Night vision definitely never caught on. Seems like it was a flash in the pan a dozen years of so ago, but not much of a thing today.
Ten years ago, when I worked for Land Rover, they had this – as did Jaguar. Their heated and cooled ventilated seats used Peltier devices in order to heat or cool the air blown by the seat fans. It was pretty great.
I looked it up – They’re just ventilated seats.
So running both at the same time is probably a purposeful thing – as the fans would help circulate warm air around you and through the cabin.
Every car I’ve ever had with ventilated seats has just been a fan under the seats pushing air through the perforated leather.
I think if they pump the AC they are “cooled seats.” If they just move air around they are “ventilated seats.”
I have a 2013 SHO with heated and cooled seats. The cooling part works much better than the heated part. On cool, they pass the a/c through your ass and back. The heated part uses a TED device and is pretty weak. My wife’s Juke has elements in the seat heaters that will run you out in about 5 minutes.
Yeah, that sounds like what I assumed. I thought Ford/Lincoln was the only one still producing cooled seats, but I just checked the lincoln website and only saw ventilated.