I ride all year and use my motorcycles as my primary transportation, so I rely on a variety of gear and use all the tricks I know to stay comfortable and safe on winter rides (even long ones in February). Keeping my hands warm was always my biggest challenge.
Last fall, with winter coming on, I tried a new approach and bought a pair of Hotwired 12V heated motorcycle gloves, which are available for $159.99 at RevZilla and Cycle Gear. I used them all of last winter and today I hooked them up for the first time this season as I had 100 miles between me and home with starting temperatures in the mid-30s. The executive summary: These gloves make long rides possible in cold weather, still allow good dexterity for managing throttle and brakes and provide at least minimal crash protection, all for a price that’s competitive with other heated gear. For all the details on the positives and a few small negatives, read on.
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The challenge of keeping your hands warm on winter motorcycle rides
My hands were always my biggest challenge on long winter motorcycle rides. I can always bulk up with layers under my jacket and pants, but with hands you have conflicting goals. You want as much feel as possible with the controls, but the more you add bulky insulation for warmth, the less feel you have. If you wear your uninsulated summer leather gloves that provide great feel, your hands quickly get cold, stiff and painful and you still end up with less feel. And in really cold temperatures or day-long rides, even the best insulated gloves won’t be enough. The solution is to provide external heat and there are two ways to do that.
Heated grips are the common solution, and on my old Kawasaki Versys, I combined aftermarket heated grips with handguards for wind and weather protection. On some of my long, cold-weather rides between Ohio and Philadelphia, the tips of my fingers and especially my thumbs (the parts sticking out from the heated grip) still got cold, but that solution worked well enough that I didn’t feel the need to try heated gloves. But when I had to replace my handlebar, I lost the heated grips and that’s when I decided to try the Hotwired gloves.
The problem with heated grips is that they keep the insides of your hands warm but the back of your hands (and fingertips) get the brunt of the cold wind. The Hotwired 12V gloves take the opposite approach. The heating elements and light insulation are in the back of the gloves, not the palms. So heated grips apply heat to the part of your hand that’s less exposed while the gloves apply heat to the part of your hand that’s out there taking the full force of the chilling wind.
The Hotwired gloves are manufactured in China and are made of a combination of leather and textile with a comfortable polyester lining. The palm is made of leather with no insulation beyond the thin polyester lining, so they provide similar feel on the controls to summer-weight gloves. On top of the leather are two suede patches, one at the base of the first three fingers and thumb, where you grip the handlebar, and another at the base of the palm. There’s also suede on the side of the first finger, useful for wiping road spray off your helmet visor.
The back of the glove is mostly textile construction with leather patches on the backs of the fingers. There is no hard knuckle protection but there are small pads on the back of the fingers, between the first and second joints, and on the back of the hand. There’s a wrist closure to snug down the gloves.
The Hotwired 12V heated gloves have about the lowest level of crash protection of any of the nine (yes, motorcycle gloves are the one thing I tend to accumulate) pairs of motorcycle gloves I have. Clearly, the focus is on weather protection, instead.
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In other words, these are all about bringing the heat. The Hotwired gloves use stainless steel alloy filaments that cover the back of the glove, all the way to the ends of the fingers. If you had experience with earlier heated gear that used copper wires, stainless steel filaments are thinner, and therefore more comfortable. People with more expertise than I also say that they will not get brittle and be likely to fail over time, like the copper lines.
If you’re using other Hotwired heated gear, such as a jacket liner, you can just plug the gloves into the liner. If you’re using the gloves alone, as I am, they come with a long wiring harness. I have one old jacket I only use in cold weather, because it is warm, and I ran the wiring between the liner and the jacket shell. I have an SAE lead on every bike I own, so I can hook up a battery tender when the bike is sitting or a USB outlet to charge my phone on the road. So I got an adapter to connect the Hotwired coaxial plug to my existing SAE lead.
The square you see on the back of the glove is the switch. Each glove is set independently to one of three heat levels or off. The switch lights up red for the high setting, yellow for medium and green for low, so you can see at a glance what setting the glove is on. The yellow can be hard to see in sunlight, and red is not really bright. Green seems always to be visible.
My first use of the gloves, after picking them up on one of my visits to RevZilla last fall, was my usual 480-mile ride home in cool temperatures. When you’re on the road eight hours, even temperatures in the low 50s can drain your body’s ability to generate heat, especially in the extremities, so heated gear really helps. I’ve since used these gloves in sub-freezing temperatures, and I’ve never had them in the high heat setting for more than a minute or two. These gloves really put out a lot of heat on high. In fact, the vast majority of the time I’ve used them, they’ve been set on low.
This morning, for example, I started out with a temperature of 34 and by the time I arrived home it was 45. I started out on medium but did most of the ride with the gloves set on low. My point is, you don’t have to worry about these gloves getting hot enough.
All of the heat is all on the backs of your hands, but I find this makes me a lot more comfortable than my previous setup of heated grips and handguards, which only kept my palms warm and meant I still needed extra stops on long rides because of painfully cold fingertips.
Hotwired says the gloves draw 22 watts, which shouldn’t be a problem for any modern motorcycle, unless you’re running other electrical accessories.
The Hotwired gloves are claimed to be waterproof. To be honest, this is the one aspect I have not tested on the road. I ride in the cold and I ride in the rain, but I try to avoid riding in both at the same time. I did give them the kitchen sink test and they did not leak. I’m a little reluctant to expose any electrical gear to rain long-term, so if I were actually out in the rain for long, I’d probably try to get by with my non-heated, waterproof, insulated winter riding gloves.
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My ride this morning, like many rides last winter, was greatly improved by the Hotwired gloves. No painful, cold and stiff fingers making me worry that I wouldn’t be able to brake effectively if something unexpected happened on the road, and along the way I’m just more comfortable.
Downsides of heated motorcycle gloves
That’s not to say they’re perfect. There are pros and cons to every solution, and in this case some apply to heated gloves in general and others are specific to the Hotwired gloves.
There’s a certain annoyance factor to using any heated gear that’s wired to your bike. You have to remember to unplug before getting off and walking away. The six-plus feet of wiring running through my jacket is not too noticeable, tucked under the lining, but the wires coming out the sleeves and the waist are something I have to tuck in every time I take off the gear. That’s why I use the same jacket for all cold-weather riding. Switching the wiring from one jacket to another would be a time-consuming annoyance.
For that reason, I considered getting battery-powered gloves, so they wouldn’t have to be connected to the bike. They would probably be fine for most of my riding. But on those occasions when I’m making the daylong trip to Philadelphia, I’d be out of juice halfway there, in the best of circumstances. So I decided to go for a wired solution that will work whenever I need them, as long as I need them.
As for drawbacks with the Hotwired gloves specifically, I can point to two. First, a lot of users have mentioned that the gauntlet is too small to fit over the sleeves of some jackets. It’s not a big deal to me because I find I can make it fit, even though it is tight. If you prefer to wear the gauntlet under your sleeve, probably not an issue.
The second thing I’d point to is the level of crash protection, which I’d classify as minimally acceptable. There are no hard sliders or knuckle protectors and the few pads on the back of the gloves seem tacked on almost at random, not in areas most likely to suffer an impact. I’ve found this is common with a lot of cold-weather motorcycle gloves. The manufacturers seem to focus on protecting us from the temperatures, not from the crash. Compared to non-motorcycle heated gloves, however, the Hotwired 12V gloves offer more protection and some motorcycle-specific features — just not as much protection as the other gloves I wear while riding.
Finally, a note on fitment. In general, these fit true to size, but if you’re between sizes, I’d probably go up one. I’m wearing a large, the size I always wear in gloves. I have odd hands. My thumbs are thick and long compared to my fingers, so gloves that fit well around the base of my thumb are usually too long in the fingers. The size large Hotwired gloves get a little uncomfortable for me on long rides because the seam at the end of the thumb presses on me. I can’t blame Hotwired for my abnormal hands, but other riders have also said they have gone up half a size. Fortunately, RevZilla makes returns and exchanges easy if you order online and your local Cycle Gear probably has these gloves in stock for you to try on.
Bottom line: I can recommend these gloves. After a season of use, they show no signs of wear, there are no loose stitches and the switches and heating filaments work as new. If I’m just running errands around town, I usually don’t bother using them, just so I don’t have to deal with the wires, but on any cold ride of more than 15 or 20 minutes, I won’t go out without them. And on the 100-mile ride to visit my mother, for example, they make me much more comfortable and safe. On something like one of my 500-mile trips to Philadelphia, they not only keep me comfortable, but they get me there faster, because I’m not having to make extra stops to thaw cold hands.
Despite the drawbacks of being wired to the bike, I’ll probably never go back to heated grips, just because heated gloves do the job so much better.
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