Cooling ventilated seats?

[Cuddlecool]

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 2017 Explorer Platinum had heated rear seats, along with its heated and cooled front seats. I don’t care about the back, but I do miss the cooled front seats. Still, I wouldn’t trade my MME for another Explorer … until Ford comes out with a BEV version.

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[Jim_In_Mass]

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.

At this point, at the risk of piling on -my two previous cars ('12 Hyundai Sonata, '18 Hyundai Santa Fe) both had heated rear seats. Granted, the Sonata is controlled by switch (if the kids leave the heated seats on, they stay on), but the Santa Fe resets each time the car restarts (so, you have to turn the cooling/heating on again).

I'm not sitting in the back of MY Mach-E, so the lack of heated seats back there isn't a deal-breaker for me....

 

[dliunatic]

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, es[ecially 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.

Thanks for the write up. It was super helpful to know the analysis you've done so far! Totally forgot about those Munroe videos about the seats... Bummer ?

 

[mkhuffman]

The last time my wife road in the back seat of my MME she complained that it didn't have heated rear seats. I explained that heated rear seats are not needed when you have a MME. That explanation didn't help at all, for some reason.

 

[ChuckA]

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

I agree for AZ. For CT the heated seats and heated steering wheel is more desirable. My ‘12 KIA Sorento that I traded in for the MME had a cooled driver seat but not cooled passenger seat. Both had heated seats.

 

[kennethjk]

No, but in my mind this is the biggest miss by Ford on this car.

Biggest miss is not offering magnaride on all models.

 

[tdwatts]

It comes down to climate. My Porsche Cayenne has both heated rear seats and cooled front seats. The only time the heated rear seats have been turned on was when someone has asked "what is this button for?"

Here on the gulf cost I don't have much of a need to heated seats, BUT cooled seats are great. I really wish my Mach-e had them.

By the way, am I the only one that finds the Mach-e's air conditioning controls to be annoying to use? The auto setting are insufficient in south Alabama.

 

[DYohn]

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've used my heated seats a couple times when it got really cold here, like down to 40F.

 

[400 VOLT]

In S. FL this time of the year I just leave it set to max AC with the recirc off (it stays off 90% of the time for me) and adjust the fan speed...usually leave it at 3 or 4

I too miss the ventilated seats although I just came across this article...
https://fordauthority.com/2022/07/heres-why-the-ford-mustang-mach-e-does-not-offer-ventilated-seats/

 

[Schmetsky]

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.

@Scooby24 are you on the EV6 forums also? Is Kia some growing pains going from ICE to EV similar to Ford?

 

[Scooby24]

@Scooby24 are you on the EV6 forums also? Is Kia some growing pains going from ICE to EV similar to Ford?

Yes, almost identical issues with respect to folks not understanding a lot of the basics.

 

[KevinS]

I have never owned or ridden in a car with cooled seats, and based on the comments in this thread, I guess that's a good thing.

 

[Scooby24]

yeah, I've had 3 people riding with me where I turned on ventilated seats in the EV6 and all of them gave the same feedback. "ew, feels like I pissed my pants".

Then never turned it on again.

 

[Jimrpa]

I love ventilated seats and I’m hoping that ford puts ventilated seats with the proper degrees of motion (front tilt, rear tilt, forward, backward, up, down, recline, lumbar up, down, in, out) in the mid-cycle refresh. While comfortable, it’s clear that, mechanically, ford went to the EcoSport for the seat mechanisms ?

 

[Steph]

Looking for ways to extend range in cold Iowa winter. Rear heated seats seems more efficient than turning automatic climate control up to 2-3 as suggested by some. Anyone install aftermarket seat heaters in the back seat?

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