Cooling ventilated seats?

[phil]

I would happily trade heated seats and steering wheel for cooled seats.

None of these is important to me. The fake suede seats in the GT Mustang are comfortable in both hot and cold weather.

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[Pioneer74]

Ventilated front seats is the only missing option this vehicle needs. After having them in 2 previous F150's and 2 Edge Titaniums, they will be missed.

But at least my Lightning will have them. I'll probably have to fight the wife for the truck in the summer.

 

[engnrng]

Just about every car I’ve owned since 2010 has had heated rear seats. Upper end trucks mainly. Number of times they were actually used in the last 12 years, ONCE that I remember.

BIG miss by Ford not putting in cooled seats. Although I’ve been told the seats are not actually cooled but just circulate cabin air. I’ve never looked at the seats to confirm. I would swear my F350 IS actually cooled, but I may be wrong. I don’t really care enough to look. They work and they work GREAT!

My Kona EV Ultimate has great cooled and heated seats. The cooling is done by routing an A/C air vent into the bottom and back of the seat through the center console "tunnel". A switch on the center console lets more or less air flow through without adding to energy consumption. The heated seats of course use resistance heaters. My Toyota Highlander has terrible cooled seats. There is a 3 speed fan near the headrest that blows air from somewhere into the seat, and it is loud and not very effective. The Hyundai design is brilliant, particularly for an EV.

 

[mkhuffman]

As someone who sweats when I think about exercising, the GT seats work as well as any ventilated seat I have ever used. Ventilated seats used to be a "must have" for my next car, and then the MME came along and I decided I could live without them. But really the material used on the GT seats works great. My buttocks don't sweat even during long drives. Win!

 

[FLmac]

Spoken like a true Arizonan. I will never own a car without heated seats and steering wheel. Let’s just have both so all seasons are covered.

I‘m in FL and actually use my heated seats pretty regularly in “winter”, but I’m a wuss and get cold when it drops to the low 60s.

I find that the light grey seats in the premium haven’t been too hot yet. I do need to get the front windows tinted though because it was hot this week.

 

[ripperAZ]

Spoken like a true Arizonan. I will never own a car without heated seats and steering wheel. Let’s just have both so all seasons are covered.

Indeed. It’s idiotic. Especially for us poor Arizonans and plus most people know you can heat your seat quickly especially after a breakfast of morning tacos. It’s A greener way of heating your seat but it does sometimes bother passengers.

FLATUHEAT.


Just saying I am thinking of getting a patent

 

[Mike G]

Just about every car I’ve owned since 2010 has had heated rear seats. Upper end trucks mainly. Number of times they were actually used in the last 12 years, ONCE that I remember.

BIG miss by Ford not putting in cooled seats. Although I’ve been told the seats are not actually cooled but just circulate cabin air. I’ve never looked at the seats to confirm. I would swear my F350 IS actually cooled, but I may be wrong. I don’t really care enough to look. They work and they work GREAT!

Yeah it's a blower under the seat that takes air from the lower console and pushes it up through the seat bottom and back. So if you have the AC on then some of that air is cooling your seat. It doesn't have a separate cooling unit or anything.

 

[TTT]

I was pretty upset about this when I ordered my car, and was hopeful Ford would fix it when we rolled over to 22s, but no.

I did a bit of research and was planning on adding either ventilation or cooled seats to my car when I got it. Note that ventilated seats take ambient air in the cabin and blow it through the seat, which is good. Cooled seats use refrigeration of some type to blow cool air thru the seat, which is better.

To do cooled seats, it is possible to route ducts from the Air Conditioning system to under the seats and use booster fans to force the air through the seats. This can be bulky, and somewhat inefficient, on multiple levels.

More often these days manufacturers will use a Peltier cooler to operate the cooled seats. A Peltier is what is used in some center console drink chillers and is a solid state cooler with no moving parts in the chilling system per se. Its a metal plate that you apply an electrical charge to, one side gets hot, the other gets cold. The you apply heat sinks to both sides and blow air across each side, chilling the air to go through the seat and taking the heat away from the other side of the plate and exhausting it out of the car.

Therein lies the first problem for the Mach e. If you do this in an ICE car, you can put the Peltier system under the seat and exhaust the waste heat out a vent in the floor. In our cars, there is a battery pack in the floor and a floor vent won't work so you can only tap into the Air Conditioning system (meaning it has to be larger and heavier) or you find a crazy path to exhaust the heat (inefficient spacially), or you just dump the heat into the cabin onto the rear passengers' toes (and again put an artificial heat load inside the cabin again meaning the vehicle AC system has to have more capacity to do the same job.

So even for Ford, cooled seats are a pain, but ventilated seats are totally doable - either from the factory or as an aftermarket. This was my goal and I was planning on modding my car to do this - except... Ford kind of hosed us here.

My plans to go ventilated would have required stripping off the seat skins, removing some of the foam and replacing it with an open structure material that comes in the conversion kits so the air can circulate through the seat cushion area before it comes out of the perforated activeX, and cutting out for a duct through the center of the seats so that a small pressure fan can be installed in the bottom of the seat cushion and perhaps in the seat back.

The problem here is illustrated in the video Sandy Munroe made going over the construction of the seats. While he doesn't dwell on the point, he does show that the seat heating pad is integral to the seat cushions and that it has a fairly tight grid of fairly fragile heating wires. From what I saw it's fairly easy to get the seat skins off, but any attempts to modify the foam to allow the open structure media to be installed, much less cut through the foam to allow the duct and fan assembly, would destroy the seat heating functionality.

Someone did post here that they would gladly trade seat heating for the cooling. You may be able to trade heating for ventilation, but I'd still worry that you'd end up with an error message every single time you start the car that there is a problem with the seat heaters because I'd bet you Ford is monitoring the resistance and integrity of the heating elements in the seats, and if you destroy them they will know and warn you about it.

For me, it's not worth hacking up the car. Now if someone can craft a solution, I'd love to hear about it, but I'm not looking for aftermarket seat covers and I don't want to hack up the seat heaters, especially just for ventilation. That being said, it's still technically spring. Maybe in August I'll REALLY be eager to get cooled or ventilated seats. Maybe by then someone here will have found a better solution.

Fingers crossed.

 

[Silver Surfer]

Disagree.

1) I don't know what vehicles have heated rear seats, but I don't know of any.

2) A significant number of people buying this car are either retired, or kids out of home (i.e. disposable income to buy it). I would much rather have that money put towards other features.

My Jeep Grand Cherokee had heated rear seats and ventilated front seats, the kids loved it.

 

[Silver Surfer]

Maybe it's just me but I'm not missing ventilated seats because the car has no engine so it doesn't get as hot inside as an ice car. I'd rather them put in the rear seat lighting and added the retractable sun blockers to the windows.

 

[Scooby24]

I have ventilated seats on my EV6 and I really don't get the hype. They feel...weird. Not really all that cooling. Just...weird.

 

[rcechinel]

I think a bigger miss was not having heated rear seats.

Why, do you hangout in there?
Just kidding...

 

[Accord07]

Disagree.

1) I don't know what vehicles have heated rear seats, but I don't know of any.

2) A significant number of people buying this car are either retired, or kids out of home (i.e. disposable income to buy it). I would much rather have that money put towards other features.

Chrysler/Dodge minivans have had heated 2nd row seats for years. The Ford Expedition rental we had a few years ago also had heated 2nd row seats. Even the Honda CR-V added heated rear seats to its top trim ~3 years ago.

My minivan has ventilated front seats but no heated 2nd row seats. If I have to choose between ventilated front seats and heated rear seats, I would pick heated rear seats.

 

[rcechinel]

I‘m in FL and actually use my heated seats pretty regularly in “winter”, but I’m a wuss and get cold when it drops to the low 60s.

I find that the light grey seats in the premium haven’t been too hot yet. I do need to get the front windows tinted though because it was hot this week.

In your opinion, tinted windows are a must?

 

[dliunatic]

Heat here in TX is already in the 100s so that's why the cooling seats would help. If I were in CA or somewhere else with more temperate climate it wouldn't matter.

I have ventilated seats on my EV6 and I really don't get the hype. They feel...weird. Not really all that cooling. Just...weird.

My 2013 Lincoln MKZ had the cooling seats and I never really used it when I was in CA. Agree that it felt weird and like you were almost peeing yourself Now in TX though I've come to really appreciate them when it gets toasty above 100 degrees on a regular basis. To each is own though!

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