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Eh, "ventilated" and "cooled" just means there's a bunch of little holes through which any fluids or fluid-like substances that contact a seating surface will become a permanent part of the vehicle. Like mud, or, with four small children, juice or any of a number of other substances which tend to emanate from their vicinity on long road trips... I'm ok with cooled/ventilated seats in the front row, but I'll take an impervious surface in the other rows, thank you very much.
I am pretty sure cooled seats, are integrated into AC system. I had them on a Lincoln MKZ(very nice). Ventilated is just a fan.
I always wondered how they worked. I thought maybe there was an ac duct that came out of the console and attached to the fan in the seat.Cooled isn't integrated into the A/C. They use a Peltier junction (also called a thermoelectric device) that moves the heat from one side of the device to the other. One end gets hot, the other side gets cold. There is a heat sink below the seat pocket, and it gets really warm (warm enough to melt my buddy's Milk Duds everywhere) when you enable the cooled seat. The other side of the system is basically a big, thin heat sink through the seat surface, and it gets cold. There's a fan on the heat sink that operates in cooling mode, to cool the warm side of the junction.
Then, to heat the seats, they simply reverse the polarity. The only difference is the fan doesn't operate in heated mode on the (now) cool non-seat side.
These same devices power electric coolers. They aren't as efficient at moving heat as an A/C system or a refrigerator, but they are very good for small systems like this. Fun fact, you can also use these devices to generate a small electric current from a temperature differential. Keep the cold side cold and the hot side hot and it will convert that energy you're inputting to electricity.