Hoping I just figured out why my seat warmers weren't working in my car today. While vacuuming out the winter's accumulation of crap in the car today, I stuck the hose under the driver's seat from the back floor and had an unplugged electrical connector slide out. When I looked under both of the front seats, I discovered that these connectors were unplugged. 

Given the low mileage that was on the car when I bought it a couple of years ago, and it's overall good condition, I'm wondering if one of the PO's were having issues with the switches accidentally being turned on given their location on the console, leaving them with extra warm asses on 90 degree days. Given how easy it is to switch them on, it seems logical that they decided to simply unplug them to avoid the problem since they maybe weren't driving the car in cold weather anyway. 

I plugged them back in again. Problem is, as warm as it was today and having had the top down and the seats exposed to the sun, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to really tell the difference if I switched them on. 

It hadn't seemed like the warmers were working at all, and one of the things on my E30 to-do list for this summer was to test the switches and track/test the wiring to see if I could determine the problem. Maybe I just discovered the problem by accident.