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).
My wife’s CX50 had ventilated seats and I recently got a CX90 without them. Didn’t think I would miss them much. Oh how wrong I was. I made the comment to my sales guy last time I was in the dealership and he said they have put them in cars in the past. I am seriously tempted to take them up on that offer. Or just try to find a trashed 90 and put them in myself.
It had never occurred to me to try it before I read this, but it turns out that I can do the same thing in our 2018 C43 – thanks for the tip ????
I’ve never seen a case where cooled seats actually work. Latest example was my C7, I could barely tell it was on and it didn’t do squat to cool me down in the AZ heat
As someone that used to photograph cars for a dealer, pre-starting a car with ventilated seats was heavenly in humid-ass 90+ degree weather. I’d be shivering in under 60 seconds.
I’ve seen a few. My Q5’s did OK, but the Toyota Sequoia from about 10-12 years ago was like sitting on an air honey table. Truly awesome on hot days.
I am now unable to own a car without ventilated seats. I’ve become very picky about the temperature of my bum.
My wife, a “woman of a certain age”, now requires seat ventilation on occasion to deal with her “power surges”.
I think our Audi will do both, but now I have to go check. My wife, while occasionally requiring seats that help her stay cool, is almost always cold, so this might help return some matrimonial harmony to the cabin of our SQ5 when things get, er, heated.
Although I had some nerves ablated in my back for chronic back pain due to fractured vertebrae, I also find the seat heater helps.
You use heated seats as a placebo effect.
Heat doesn’t help muscle repair—it hurts and slows it. The heat feels good on your skin, but actually icing muscles would do more for you.
researchers and trainers have reversed course on icing for the last 10 years or so. I.e. https://journals.lww.com/nsca-jscr/fulltext/2013/05000/topical_cooling__icing__delays_recovery_from.24.aspx
Ummmmmm, no. Not a placebo. Heat breaks down fascial adhesions.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/muscle-pain-it-may-actually-be-your-fascia
Heat can relax muscles, but it definitely doesn’t help repair them.
I pulled a muscle in my back (somehow) earlier this year. Icing it soothed the pain, but once the ice pack had warmed up, the pain came back as bad as (or even worse than) before. Basic OTC pain medicine didn’t do a thing. I figured I was going to have an awful night’s sleep, and then have to see a doctor or chiropractor in the morning. As a last attempt, I sat in front of the hot fire we had going that night for a while, and I was as good as new. You do the math.
Not much comment here on the specific appeal of heated seats to passengers with cramps, or wearing skirts or dresses in cold weather. A dancer friend (not that kind of dancer) drove a stripper car (a manual Versa, not that kind of stripper car) and thought my heated seats were the bee’s knees. But she didn’t enjoy Ultimate, so…
Are…you…sure…that a Versa is _not_ “that kind” of stripper car?
Does this require two subscriptions?
So clever, you stay comfortable and also can whisk your taco truck gas away at the same time.
Using a seat heater in hot weather sounds like absolute hell.
It’s good fun though to turn on your passenger’s seat heater, and see how long it takes them to notice…
Those raised in Texas are a bit different. Their brains get a little cooked.
My understanding is that most of the European manufacturers have this because of skiing. You come off the slopes to drive home, it’s cold out, and you’re sweating. By running both at the same time, you stay warm but the ventialtion dries out your sweat so you stay comfortable.
I recall my initial bafflement when setting my heater to defrost and the AC came on. Same concept though, get the humidity away.
I’d also add, not just skiing. This would also be good after digging your car out and getting cold and sweaty.
Lived in Houston and SoCal- It pisses me off to no end that most of the cars I buy in these two sweltering and never cold places- have seat heaters standard (or part of some low to mid package) but if I want seat coolers…. NO you’re going up to the High Dolomites Platinum Altitude ZR Yellowstone package that adds 50% to the sticker of the car. I want my seat heaters removed and coolers put in. This should be an option for the 50% of cars that may see sub freezing temperatures once in their sweltering, swampy lives.
This is my hill- I’ve posted on it multiple times and will die on it.
Btw “37, Including me?” 37.
THIS. I live in Puerto Rico, and I’ve never turned on my seat heater. However, I might give it a chance after reading it might be good for back pain.
I’m more annoyed that for the longest time I seemed to have never been able to find a car with heated seats equipped in Arizona/California, and with a leather interior it’s really nice to have heated seats on a chilly morning.
Not telling Dear Spouse about this. We just paid off the line of credit.
Dang. Remember when Jason Lee was ‘that dude that used to skate for Blind’ and not ‘Earl’?
When I tell people the ex-pro skater turned actor turned photographer. They say who? Then I show them a picture and they say oh Earl :facepalm:
My Audi also operates this way… which I guess makes sense, given parts bin proximity.
Also, Mallrats reference FTW.
Volvos allow this too. First thing I check when car shopping, since you generally can’t look it up online.
Having worked in product development at a major OEM I will never forget trying to keep a straight face in a meeting where a senior leader asked about the ventilated seats — asking rather loudly if they suck or blow – and the only thing I could think of was the Spaceballs and the scene with megamaid
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vWNJZrdn7i4/maxresdefault.jpg
The best heaters are the GM truck heaters, which allow you to heat your sore back while keeping your posterior relatively cool.
Also – most cooling systems pull heat away (suction) rather than blowing air on you. Sounds counterintuitive but it’s actually more comfortable to the body in that direction, plus you don’t ever get the hairdryer effect in the summer where hot ambient air is blown at you.
+1 for back heaters, even for the usual purpose of warming up in the winter. Maybe I’m weird, but I find it much more pleasant (and effective) than the bun burners. Likewise with heated steering wheels.
Posts like these are not helping me resist the call of the Boxster. I am trying to convince myself I’m good with the Eunos, but man I want a Porsche
the X6M seats i installed in my e70 X5 do this- ventilation and heating can be activated at the same time.
now, said car just blew its engine last week so i’m at a cross roads- but i still love those seats
I use cooled seats year round. I don’t see how you could use heated seats all year.
As an old man with a bad back, I totally get Matt’s choice. Although living in Texas, my seats are usually more than adequately hot without the seat warmers from April through November.
I’ve got this same control stack in my 981- never did it occur to me I could try both. Will do that today!
Sorry, I still don’t quite get what you mean. Don’t they cancel each other out if you have them both on at the same time?
Don’t think of them as “cooled” seats, but rather “ventilated” seats. The seat pulls air through it so you don’t get all sticky, but it doesn’t actually directly cool you down.
Similarly, most cars use the AC system to defrost/defog the windows, not because it makes the air cold, but because it pulls the humid air out of the car and replaces it with dry air.
Porsche is the only one that truly “gets” it when it comes to seat cooling. Pulling the heat away, not introducing cool.
Plus, as Matt Farah says about Porsche seat ventilation, “They’re the fart evacuator!”
The VAG has long been at the pinnacle of seat temp technology. my ’93 Audi 100cs Quattro had dials 1-10 for heat, and you could nearly cook your lunch on the highest setting. It was GLORIOUS for back pain and Canadian winters (especially when the HVAC shit itself).