Hi All.

My car (2009 VDP) has been doing this since I got it earlier this year. No changes at all. When I turn on the ventilated seats I hear a fan/compressor of some sort come on, but only get air through the seats sometimes. Maybe for 30 seconds - 1 minute, then it shuts off for several minutes. When I do feel it, it is cool, and refreshing in this Atlanta heat!

I'd expect the air to come through the seats constantly, but no. My wife says she never feels anything through the seats, but I'm not as concerned about her ...

Thoughts on what could be going with my seats? I do realize that I probably should be a bit more scientific about this and feel both seats ventilated AND heating for myself, but I'm not known for always doing the right thing.

 

The heated seats work in closed loop - in that there is a thermistor feedback loop - presumably to stop them getting too hot, but when in cooling mode the are open loop.
So if the seats cool well and you can feel cold air coming through the backrest and base then it is probably one of the Peltier cells that have failed.
The flexible ducts in the seats do crack also, and waste all the air but that is easily seen by inspection.


The issue is that without IDS (not sure if you have access to this or dealer level diagnostics) you won't be able to confirm if one/ other is not working

Your symptoms sound like mine, when my driver side seat back module failed - it looked okay visually, but had failed internally so the cooled function worked but not heating.

It would be work scanning for codes with dealer level diagnostics, as there are about 34 codes that the climate seat module can flag, which might help at narrowing the problem down?

Hope this helps.
Simon.

 

I'll have to do more investigation...