Leave passenger and/or rear heated seats on for more miles?

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JayFiveAlive

Member
Joined
Jun 13, 2014
Messages
19
Location
Boulder, CO
The dealer was telling me to use the heated seats and the heated steering wheel over the air-heat to conserve energy if I wanted. Playing around with everything later tonight, my wife put the heated seats on high and the estimated miles went up about 5-6 miles... which got me thinking... Generally I drive alone in my commute, so what if I left the rear and/or passenger heated seats on all the time? Would I actually get more miles? Is there any risk or downside to leaving them on if they do indeed give more miles? And lastly, why does using them give more miles?
 
JayFiveAlive said:
if I left the rear and/or passenger heated seats on all the time? Would I actually get more miles?
No
why does using them give more miles?
It doesn't.
That display you are looking at is affectionately known as the GOM. That stands for "Guess-O-Meter". And that's all it is - a guess. It changes based on how much battery is left, if you have climate control turned on or off, and most importantly, you're recent driving style.

The heated seats and steering wheel don't use up too much juice, and won't affect your mileage much. The dealer was right though - using the heater will use a lot of energy. If you go to the energy use screen on the center computer, it will give you an estimate of how many more miles you could travel if you turn climate control off.
 
Don't recall where I saw this, but the steering wheel is 2W of heat. This is so low, that if you left it on all the time, you would lose about 75' of range from a full charge.
 
mctom987 said:
Don't recall where I saw this, but the steering wheel is 2W of heat. This is so low, that if you left it on all the time, you would lose about 75' of range from a full charge.
Side benefit: if I left it on all the time, the wheel would be so hot I'd need driving gloves most of the time, whereby I could pretend to be Juan Manuel Fangio :D
 
Just to emphasize, you don't get more mileage from using the wheel and seat heaters, you just get fewer penalty miles than if you used air heat.

If you are running the heat, it is generally because the human in the seat is cold. Humans suck at temperature regulation. When you are "cold" you want super hot air lasting at you to "warm you up", but then you'll get hot and turn it down. To make the super hot heat, you have to fill the entire volume of air in the Leaf with hot air. That's a lot of warm air doing nothing but fogging up your windows and losing heat to the glass. So if you turn on the butt warmers and hand warmers you will "feel" just as warm as with the air, but there is much less air being heated. It is going right into you. This trick loses less mileage because it is more efficient in both the electric draw and the time it is on for.
 
I guess there is no way to turn the heated seats on remotely...if there is I don't know it. It sure would be nice to get into a heated seat on a cold morning.
 
deserthi said:
I guess there is no way to turn the heated seats on remotely...if there is I don't know it. It sure would be nice to get into a heated seat on a cold morning.
If you're into hacking the car, it shouldn't be too difficult. It's just a 12V relay.
Normally, the seats are always powered, because running that much current through the little switches would be problematic. With them always "ready", it just takes a small energizing current from the switch to close the circuit. With a little hacking, you can close that relay yourself with an arduino or similar.
 
JayFiveAlive said:
The dealer was telling me to use the heated seats and the heated steering wheel over the air-heat to conserve energy if I wanted. Playing around with everything later tonight, my wife put the heated seats on high and the estimated miles went up about 5-6 miles... which got me thinking... Generally I drive alone in my commute, so what if I left the rear and/or passenger heated seats on all the time? Would I actually get more miles? Is there any risk or downside to leaving them on if they do indeed give more miles? And lastly, why does using them give more miles?
ugh! we should start a new forum for the best BS from a car salesman. these guys can and do say anything to make a sale
 
apvbguy said:
JayFiveAlive said:
The dealer was telling me to use the heated seats and the heated steering wheel over the air-heat to conserve energy if I wanted. Playing around with everything later tonight, my wife put the heated seats on high and the estimated miles went up about 5-6 miles... which got me thinking... Generally I drive alone in my commute, so what if I left the rear and/or passenger heated seats on all the time? Would I actually get more miles? Is there any risk or downside to leaving them on if they do indeed give more miles? And lastly, why does using them give more miles?
ugh! we should start a new forum for the best BS from a car salesman. these guys can and do say anything to make a sale
What the salesperson said was completely accurate if reported correctly, just mis-interpreted by the listener. You _will_ conserve energy by using the seat and steering wheel heaters instead of the air (space) heater, and that's exactly the advice that's given here to newbies. What you won't do is gain range relative to using no heat at all, which is solely the OP's mistaken extrapolation owing to less than full understanding of the salesperson's statement.
 
deserthi said:
I guess there is no way to turn the heated seats on remotely...if there is I don't know it. It sure would be nice to get into a heated seat on a cold morning.

That's easy! Just leave the switch for the seat(s) you want activated on, and on the level you want. It/they will turn off with the car.The car will then turn that/those seats on with the climate control. This is true of all leafs with heated seats, AFAIK. It was true of my 2013, 2018, and now my 2021.
 
AlexJall said:
Don't recall where I saw this, but the steering wheel is 2W of heat. This is so low, that if you left it on all the time, you would lose about 75' of range from a full charge.

It's not, actually uses more power than the seat heaters, a lot more; don't remember the exact amount. I could measure them all in my Gen 2 though if people really want to know the exact amount. :mrgreen:
 
AlexJall said:
Don't recall where I saw this, but the steering wheel is 2W of heat. This is so low, that if you left it on all the time, you would lose about 75' of range from a full charge.

Considerably more than 2W. Source: I tried in vain using a 2W incandescent flashlight to keep warm inside a sleeping bag on a record-breaking cold night. It was nearly imperceptible. Given the size of the wheel, how hot it gets and that it's constantly losing heat to convection and radiation, I'd guess it's consuming around 40-80W when it's on.
 
HerdingElectrons said:
Keep in context the bulk of this post was back in 2014 and someone copy pasted one of the comments just the other day but yeah the wheel is way more than 2w of heat.

Doing that is a spammer trick for getting posting credits at a restrictive site like this. Thanks for finding that - the poster is going away.
 
JayFiveAlive said:
And lastly, why does using them give more miles?

Because your wife turned off the cabin heating.
Of course, if your wife agreed to not use any heating at all, the GOM would skyrocket back to near summer range estimate. :)
 
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