Front Seat Heater/cooler problems of the 2001 GMC Yukon

My complaint pertains to heated seats - I was driving home from PA on 3/16/08 in the early am. My 17 yr old son was in the front passenger seat and a friend of his, mike was asleep on the middle row of seats. He had a blanket wrapped up to make a pillow and laid it on the seat. My son and I begin to smell a foul odor and assumed it was the manf. Plants that we were passing by. It wasn't until mike was awakened by the heat on his hand, that we realized the seat was smoldering. Mike did receive minor burns on his hand/arm. When mike moved the blanket, it was burnt all the way through and resembled "swiss cheese". The seat has a burn in it the size of a softball. We were able to extinguish the smoldering with water bottles that we had in the car. Had the blanket not been flame retardant, I hate to think what could have happened to mike's face and head! also, the thought of a baby or small child sitting in that back seat, makes me ill.

Heated seat module failed and instead of just not working it stayed on, ran my battery down, caused my seat to get really hot to the touch and I was concerned about it catching fire. If a module is faulty it should shut off not stay on and caused the possibility of a fire and run your battery down. Gm had to disconnect the seat module to get it to go off. They want $481 to fix and could not guarantee that it wouldn't happen again. I paid them $150 to disconnect and this way I know it won't happen again. This is a safety issue, my Yukon could have burned up. . . . . After buying a new battery (since this caused the other one to go bad)I had to disconnect the battery until I could get it to carl black to disconnect permanently.