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Traditional vehicle air conditioning systems condition the entire cabin to a comfortable range of temperature and humidity regardless of the number of passengers in the vehicle. The A/C system is designed to have enough capacity to provide comfort for transient periods when cooling down a soaked car. Similarly for heating, the entire cabin is typically warmed up to achieve comfort. Localized heating and cooling, on the other hand, focuses on keeping the passenger comfortable by forming a micro climate around the passenger. This is more energy efficient since the system only needs to cool the person instead of the entire cabin space and cabin thermal mass. It also provides accelerated comfort for the passenger during the cooling down periods of soaked cars. Additionally, the system adapts to the number of passengers in the car, so as to not purposely condition areas that are not occupied.

The thermal comfort of automobile occupants depends on many complex heat exchanges, and it follows that many comfort research projects are done in laboratories, where conditions can be more readily controlled and the human subjects closely monitored. The laboratory setting, however, may appear unrealistic to a subject because it does not move and it does not afford the experience of driving or being a passenger. This could affect the research results if the test subject's level of exertion were inappropriate, or if the unrelieved focus on comfort questionnaires caused the subject to be unduly sensitive to his or her thermal comfort. In a recent laboratory study, a computer driving game was used as an inexpensive way to increase the realism for the subjects, and this paper examines the physiological effects of using the game. The metabolic rates of subjects playing or watching the game were found to be very close to their rates when driving or riding in a real car.