Warm & Safe Ultimate Touring heated gloves

We have long been fans of the American heated clothing brand Warm & Safe. They are not the best known name in the UK market, but that does not mean that they don't produce the best heated gear.

 

The company is a little bit eccentric. It's not run by men in suits, but rather by clever, albeit not always particularly communicative, boffins who live and breathe the technology of heated gear. In fact, these guys will tell you that the other brands just copy all of their innovative practices. Truth be told, that's how we often feel at Motolegends, so we sympathise!

 

We are not fans of most heated gloves. To us, they often rely too much on insulating materials, and not enough on the heating elements. Which is why we always liked Warm & Safe's inner gloves. You could wear them under any glove, and the heating elements ran so close to the skin that you could not fail to have warm hands. But Warm & Safe has stopped making its inner gloves, so that's history.

 

Warm & Safe produce a number of gloves, but we reckon the Ultimate is the best one in their range. The chassis is a super-soft, Grade A, full-grain leather. So this is going to be as comfortable to wear as an electric glove is ever going to be.

 

The glove is backed with a thin layer of Thinsulate which is there to trap the heated air that is generated by the heating elements. The gloves also incorporate a waterproof liner. Again, this will serve to insulate heat, but clearly it will also help keep the rain off. Heated gloves, by the way, tend to work really well in the rain because, when the heat is turned up high, the rain that has been absorbed by the glove will often just evaporate.

 

The Ultimate glove also brooks few compromises from a protection standpoint. You get a Kevlar-style lining in the palm for abrasion resistance. And you get a leather-covered, carbon, knuckle protector. Everything else is what you would expect. Two wrist straps. An open-back construction. 3M Scotchlite. Extra layers of leather on the palm. And an assortment of pads and protectors.

 

In terms of heating elements, they run down the sides of the fingers, and down the tops of the fingers. Some heated gloves have their elements on the back of the hand. That's not particularly efficient. That's not where you need the heat. And, more importantly, you end up just heating the atmosphere!

 

One of the things that Warm & safe is very proud of with this glove is that it has touchscreen sensitivity. There aren't many heated gloves that can offer this.

 

The glove is only 12 volt, so cannot be powered by a portable battery. And it will only work with a heat controller. Technically, you could wire it directly to the bike, but you would end up burning your hands. So the Heat-troller is mandatory from our perspective. And preferably a dual controller, because your hands won't always feel the heat the same way as your torso does.

 

There is one major problem with many heated gloves. And those are gloves where the cuff is designed to be worn on the outside of the jacket's sleeve. When you have this, routing the wires from the glove into the jacket to connect to the heated jacket can be nigh on impossible. The good news with the Ultimate glove is that the glove's cuff cinches tight enough to easily go inside the sleeves of most outer jackets.

 

We still like, in many ways, heated, inner gloves, but we're confident that the Ultimates will work well for most people. It's got all the right bits, and we trust the guys at Warm & Safe. They are really in to it. They know what they're talking about, and they tend to get things right.