It’s the week of Thanksgiving at Jalopnik HQ, but even the biggest of holidays don’t cause Jalopnik HQ to completely shut down. Someone, after all, has to provide you all with blogs to read while you’re avoiding questions about when you’re having kids or ignoring your family’s bad political views that somehow always come up at dinner. That someone is all of us, and our blogs can’t really be tied to the news cycle because we are also avoiding questions about kids and bad political views, thus we cannot monitor it all day and all night. Plus, it’s not like many U.S.-market cars debut on Thanksgiving.
And because I don’t feel like sharing with you a YouTube video I saw for this year’s Thanksgiving blog, as you probably also saw said YouTube video while ignoring your family, I want to share with you all my most sacred and long-held belief: that seat heaters are perhaps the greatest feature on a car.
You see, I live in Texas, which is considered “warm,” but I’m generally a very cold person. Freezing. All the time. I think the ice stems from my heart and cools my extremities, leaving me in a constant state of shivering and covered in goosebumps. That’s why I run the seat heaters in my car from October through approximately late April every year, because 68 degrees is chilly enough for me.
Over the long period that I’ve run my seat heaters for more than six months out of the year—which has been every year that I’ve had a car—I’ve come to realise that they’re one of the few things I look forward to in the winter. The holidays? Eh. Lower bills because my husband isn’t running the air conditioning? Eh. Seat heaters? Glory to the higher power that blessed us with this.
“Seat heaters?” my husband will say as we’re sitting in his cold, dead Honda Civic, whose air conditioning doesn’t work most of the time and which certainly has no seat heaters. “There’s no need for them. The heat works just fine.”
His heat does not, in fact, work “just fine,” and the climate-control knob can’t be turned past a certain point in the red without a catastrophic meltdown. Both of our cars are cheap and have their own respective problems, but at least mine has seat heaters.
But even if it did, seat heaters aren’t like the heat coming from the vents. The heat comes from behind, creating a cocoon of warmth to remind you that not everything in the world is bad. Cold? Blast the heat and the seat heaters. Can’t decide if you’re warm or cold? Run the seat heaters and the air conditioning. Free will and all.
Seat heaters are the constant warmth in my life. They’re the thing that reminds me my frigid, hardened soul can be thawed out, at least temporarily—making them one of the greatest features a car can have.
Maybe talk about that at dinner instead.