I happened to have a FLIR E5 camera to play with for a few days, so naturally I wanted to see what my car looks like in IR. It was a cold day (14F /-10C) with heavy snow, and the front of the car looked like a giant snowball after my commute.
No worries, my car has an All-Weather Package:
- Heated outside mirrors
- Rear underseat heater ducts
- Hybrid heater system
- Heated front seats
- Heated steering wheel
This is very useful both for driver comfort but also to minimize energy usage when driving. It takes a lot less energy to heat my seat and steering wheel than to condition air in the whole cabin. It also helps to have a heat pump (hybrid heater system) instead of a brute force resistive heater. The heater does switch to pure resistive when things get very cold, since heat pump efficiency drops as things get colder. For a comparison, each seat warmer draws around 15W on low and 30-40W on high. Cabin heat measures in kW even with heat pump..
Let’s look at the steering wheel first: approx 80F over most of the wheel
And now let’s look at the heated seats: 65F or so over rnost of the heated surface.
Resources:
- Forum thread on seat heater power consumption