Troubleshooting why the drivers-seat heater does not work ? When activating the heater controller , the passenger-side works fine but,the drivers-side does not stay on? Could it be a bad seat heater/mirror controller or the under seat module? Thanks

 

Hi there, I'm curious what you've found out. I have an R53 ('06) and the drivers side will only stay on momentarily. Sometimes that moment is less than a second, sometimes long enough to start to warm the seat...but that's about as far is it goes. So the element works, the fuse is not blown, the switch works...but there is something that tells it to shut off.

Having typed all this out, I wonder if there's a relay somewhere that has a trip mechanism? Anyone have any thoughts?

TIA
Mike

 

Have the same in my car, push button, light comes on shuts off quickly Drivers side 2005 R53s

 

Well that's 3 of us; is that enough for a class action lawsuit lol?

 

My Mini has the exact same symptoms as all three of your posts and this leads me to believe the seat heater/ mirror switch is defective. I need to try another known “good switch” to isolate the problem . Thanks guys for your input....

 

I am just guessing but if the heater is bad the controller may be shutting off as sort of a safety mode.

 

Same thing happened in my E82, it turned out to be a faulty temp sensor in the seat. It required replacing the entire heating element.

 

Bring out yer dead....

I pulled the seat out today in an attempt to diagnose it without going nuts with tools. I note there are 4 sets of connectors at the front of the seat. I disconnected them all coz that's the kind of guy I am. All connectors looked intact, same for the wiring that I could see. Put it all back together and started the engine, Switched both seat heaters on while outside of the car, and both work. But when I sit in the seat, the heater turns off. It will come back on, sometimes momentarily, sometimes for quite sometime...

So it appears to tie with my weight shift in the seat. The next step will be to pull the seat again, remove the leather...trace the wires in th ecea pad. Oh joy.

 

I have the same and swapped my seats around and confirmed the problem followed. Anyone know where to get a new seat heater?

 

jj did you see that the heater was burnt out or anything? I'm curious what you found. I saw a video on YT that has a guy peeling back the seat leather and he found a wire had burnt out; he repaired the wire and good to go. I'm leaning in this direction; peel the leather back and see where it takes me.

As far as replacing the heater part of it, I 'believe' you have to buy a whole new seat. If that really is the case, and you're going to buy a new seat, why not attempt a fix first? Worst thing that could happen is you'll need to buy a new seat, right?

 

I seen people have breaks in the wire and i seen the wire burn the seat, rare but happened. https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...seat-burn.html

 

Excellent info, thank you ECS! It took me on a rabbit hole journey and gave me some fresh answers I didn't have, along with some fresh questions I didn't know I wanted!

 

And back I am...I went to work on breaking down the driver's seat and found that the heating element is actually attached to the leather of the seat; sewn like a sandwich to the back of it. The wires at the entry point into the leather sandwich looked fine...I think I'm going to give up on this seat pad.

My question is, and I'm going to put it in another thread...if anyone knows whether I can just swap the seat cushions left to right? The only wire I have running to the seat cushion is the heater element.

 

Well here I am again. I pulled the pax seat out and pulled it apart thinking I could use the seat pad from it on the driver's side. Nope. The occupancy pad was embedded in the foam and seemed like way too much trouble to removed it and try to replicated installation on the other foam seat. I believe though, it would. have physically fit without a problem, as they appeared identical in every respect except for that. Maybe if I was skilled, I would be able to detach the leather cover and heat pads from their many retainer clips and sway them over. An upholsterer should be able to do that and it would work. I had to race off to work though, so scrambled to reassemble the seats and throw them back in.

So I just put everything back together and drove it to work. Sems that all the messing around with the wires shows that the heater works better than it did, so I'm going to say there's a wire with a crack in it, that moves when I move in the seat, which in turn shuts it off.

 

I had my drivers seat repaired where they sowed a part of the seam in the seat bottom. They also added some foam...

the heat never worked again...fragile things