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).
