Temperature changes hit motorcycle riders a lot harder than car drivers; for most of us, the best we can do is stick a newspaper down our jackets on cold days and open some zips when it’s hot, assuming we don’t want to squid it around the place with our fleshy parts dangling out.
Sure, you can get heated handgrips onto most bikes pretty cheaply, and those do more than you’d expect. There are other more involved solutions for cooling, like air conditioned helmets and the EntroSys BikeAir system, which sits on your back seat and pipes cool air straight up into your jacket, but nothing has really been embraced by manufacturers shy of the odd heated seat on a tourer.
Which makes the awkwardly named ClimaCommand Classic seat from Indian Motorcycles somewhat of a pioneering device. It offers you several levels of heating and cooling, applied directly to your backside and the backside of your passenger as you ride.
Available as an accessory for the entire (sigh) ThunderStroke range (including the Vintage, the Chief Dark Horse, the Springfield Dark Horse, the Roadmaster Elite, the Chieftain Classic and the Chief), the ClimaCommand seat uses a graphene nanomaterial heated and cooled by a thermoelectric module, to spread the appropriate temperature right out across the seats. Rider and passenger get separate controls, offering low, medium and high rates of heating and cooling.
It doesn’t pipe air through to your tender haunches like the fancy seats in luxury cars, so we’ll be interested to see how well it prevents the red, itchy “monkey butt” condition you’ll be familiar with if you’ve spent long, sweaty days on the road, but it’ll sure be nice for comfort, and anything that can help bikers regulate temperature will help them keep their leathers on, so there’s a safety bonus too.
Indian Motorcycles can now heat and cool your butt [New Atlas]