What a heated garment is not
We put this first because it is the mistake this category invites. Four of the seven picks above are called liners, which is unambiguous — nobody wears a liner on its own. The other three are a jacket, a vest and a fleece vest, and all three look like something you could ride in.
They are not. We read all seven maker pages on 1 October 2026 and not one publishes an abrasion class, an impact level, or any CE marking whatsoever. Tourmaster describes the Synergy BT Pro-Plus jacket as “100% polyester wind- and water-resistant soft-shell fabric” with a nylon liner, a microfleece collar and rib-knit cuffs. That is an accurate description of a very nice soft-shell jacket and it is also a description of a garment with no armor pockets, no abrasion panels and no published class. Compare it to anything on our jackets with armor page, where the question is which CE level is in the box rather than whether there is armor at all.
The practical rule is short. Buy heated gear to replace your mid-layer, never to replace your jacket. That also tells you how to size it: snug, over a thin base layer, with enough room left in your riding jacket that the shoulder and elbow armor still sits where it should. Stuffing a heated liner into a jacket that was already a close fit pushes armor off the joint, which is a real safety cost for a comfort upgrade. Our guide to how riding gear should fit covers checking armor placement in the riding position rather than standing in front of a mirror.
Watts, not zones
Here is the whole category in one table of published figures, every one read from the maker’s own page on 1 October 2026:
- Firstgear Gen4 jacket liner— 106 W, seven carbon panels (chest, abdomen, arms, collar, entire back)
- Gerbing jacket liner and Jacket Liner 2.0— 135 °F at 77 W, 12V DC 6.4 A, seven Microwire zones (collar, chest ×2, sleeves ×2, back ×2)
- Gerbing vest liner— 135 °F at 54 W, 12V DC 4.5 A, five Microwire zones (collar, chest ×2, back ×2)
- Tourmaster Synergy BT Pro-Plus jacket— 12V DC, 42 W, 3.5 A, seven carbon fiber elements (chest, sleeves, back, collar)
- Tourmaster Synergy BT Pro-Plus vest— 12V DC, 37.2 W, 3.1 A, four carbon fiber elements (chest, back, collar)
- ORORO heated fleece vest— four carbon zones (both hand pockets, mid-back, collar). No wattage published anywhere on the page.
Read that list and the ranking explains itself. The Firstgear liner publishes two and a half times the output of the Tourmaster jacket across the same number of elements. Divide watts by elements — our arithmetic, not the makers’ — and you get roughly 15 W per panel on the Firstgear, 11 W on the Gerbing jacket liner, 11 W on the Gerbing vest, 9 W on the Tourmaster vest and 6 W on the Tourmaster jacket. Seven elements fed by 42 watts is seven mildly warm patches; seven elements fed by 106 watts is a different garment.
One useful cross-check on all of this: where a maker publishes both watts and amps, the two agree on 12 volts almost exactly. Gerbing’s 77 W at 6.4 A, its 54 W at 4.5 A, Tourmaster’s 42 W at 3.5 A and 37.2 W at 3.1 A all divide out to within a rounding error of 12 V. These are real electrical specifications rather than marketing numbers, which is exactly why the two gaps are worth naming: Firstgear publishes a watt figure but no voltage and no current, and ORORO publishes no watt figure at all.
Your charging system has a budget, and you are already spending it
Watts are not free. A 106-watt liner on a 12-volt system draws roughly 8.8 amps — again our arithmetic, since Firstgear does not publish the current — which is the largest single load on this page. Gerbing publishes 6.4 A for its 77 W liner and 4.5 A for the 54 W vest. Tourmaster’s figures are the gentlest at 3.5 A and 3.1 A.
Whether that matters depends entirely on your bike. A large touring machine will not notice any of it. A small or older single with a modest alternator, already running heated grips and auxiliary lights, can absolutely run a deficit at idle in traffic — and the first symptom is a battery that will not start it the next morning. If you do not know your bike’s surplus output, the honest move is the Tourmaster or the vest rather than the biggest liner you can find. More watts you cannot feed is not more heat.
This is also the one real argument for the battery-powered ORORO vest that has nothing to do with convenience: it draws nothing from the bike at all.
12 volts from the bike, or a battery in a pocket
Every pick here is one or the other, and the choice is bigger than the brand.
Wired to the bikemeans the heat lasts exactly as long as the ride does. That is the entire case, and for touring it is decisive — nothing about a nine-hour day in the cold is improved by a garment that quits at hour three. The costs are a fused harness to the battery, a controller, and the fact that you are physically tethered to the motorcycle: step off at a fuel stop and you unplug. Five of the seven picks above are wired, and both Tourmaster garments can also run from an optional 12 V lithium pack, sold separately, if you want it both ways.
Battery-poweredmeans no installation, no controller and no tether. It works on a borrowed bike, a rental, and in a cold car park afterwards. The cost is a hard ceiling on runtime: ORORO’s own Mini 5K pack publishes 4800 mAh at 7.4 V and up to 10 hours — 3 hours on high, 6 on medium, 10 on low — on a four-hour charge. Read that honestly and the three hours on high is the number that matters, because high is the setting you will use on the morning you bought it for. This is the same trade our heated gloves page works through on the hands, and the conclusion is the same: battery for short cold rides, 12 volts for long ones.
Jacket, liner or vest
Shape decides more than badge here, so it is worth being deliberate.
A jacket linerheats arms as well as core. That sounds obviously better and usually is, but it comes with wiring down the sleeves, which is the part most likely to fight your riding jacket’s elbow armor and the part that fails first on any heated garment. A vest heats the core only, and the honest physiology is that a warm core does a surprising amount for how cold your hands and feet feel, because your body stops shutting down circulation to the extremities to protect it. For a lot of riders, a heated vest plus good gloves beats a heated liner plus mediocre gloves.
A standalone heated jacket like the Tourmaster is the third shape: a soft-shell you can wear as a jacket when you are not riding, with the controller built in. It is genuinely the most convenient thing here and the lowest output, and it is the one most likely to be mistaken for protective gear. All three shapes are ranked above; none of them is the right answer for everyone.
The controller is a second purchase, and nobody mentions it
This is the detail that turns a $180 liner into a $250 one. Gerbing states plainly that “all Gerbing installations require a Battery Harness and Temperature Controller for operation (sold separately)” — that is two items, and it applies to the jacket liner, the 2.0 and the vest liner alike. Firstgear’s liner works with “either a Single or Dual Heat-troller”, also a separate purchase. None of those costs is in the price you see on the cards above, because the cards show the live price of the garment we link and nothing else.
The two Tourmaster garments are the exception and it is their strongest argument: the controller is built into the garment — a 3-setting LED soft-touch control, plus a Bluetooth app as a second way in. Tourmaster is also the only maker here that publishes what each setting actually reaches: 126 °F on high, 113 °F on medium, 100 °F on low. Gerbing publishes a single max-heat figure of 135 °F and Firstgear publishes none. If you want to buy one box and have heat on the first cold morning, the Tourmaster is the pick, and you are paying for that in watts.
One thing worth knowing if you expect to grow the system: Gerbing describes its jacket liner as the “home base” for glove, pant and sock connections, and the vest liner ships with a pre-wired connector for pant liners. If heated trousers are plausibly in your future, that is a reason to start on Gerbing even though it is not our first pick.
What the ranking is saying
- The Firstgear Gen4 liner is first because it is both the cheapest 12-volt liner here and the one with the most published heat. 106 watts across seven carbon panels covering chest, abdomen, arms, collar and the entire back, in a moisture-wicking shell with stretch side and back panels so it layers without bulk, with a one-year warranty. Buyer-first, that combination ends the argument. The two honest limitations: the Heat-troller is extra, and 106 W is the biggest demand on this page if your bike’s charging system is marginal.
- The Gerbing liner is second on the strength of what Gerbing stands behind. It publishes less output than the Firstgear — 135 °F at 77 W — and it publishes more detail, including the 6.4-amp draw, which nobody else at the top of this page does. It carries a lifetime warranty on the Microwire heating elements themselves, and it is the hub a full heated system plugs into. If you intend to own this garment in 2036, buy it instead.
- The Tourmaster Synergy BT Pro-Plus jacket is third for convenience and nothing else. No controller to order, published setting temperatures, a wearable soft-shell. 42 watts across seven elements is the thinnest spread here, and the garment’s resemblance to a riding jacket is the single most dangerous thing on this page. Ranked, with that said out loud.
- The Tourmaster vest is the best vest herebecause it brings the built-in controller and the app down to a lower price, in a shape with no sleeve wiring to route. Four elements instead of seven means nothing on the arms, and 37.2 W is the lowest published figure on the page — but it is also 9 watts per element against the jacket’s 6, so the core actually gets more.
- The Gerbing vest liner is the vest for a Gerbing system. 135 °F at 54 W over five zones, a third less current than the jacket liner, the same lifetime element warranty, and a pre-wired connector that feeds heated pants. Gerbing says to wear it close to the body over a thin base layer, which is a real constraint worth reading before you plan to stack it over a sweater.
- The Jacket Liner 2.0 is the same heat in a better jacket. Identical published specification to the original — 135 °F at 77 W, 6.4 A, seven Microwire zones — rebuilt with a water-resistant ripstop shell, a two-way zipper, a removable hood and a packable pocket. It costs more for no extra warmth, so it earns its place only if you want one heated layer that works at the campsite too. The hood is useless under a helmet and we would take it off.
- The ORORO fleece vest is last on the list and first for a specific rider: anyone who will not fit a harness. Four zones including both hand pockets — which no wired motorcycle liner here heats — and a published 10 hours on low from a 7.4 V pack. It is ranked last because ORORO publishes no wattage, so there is no way to put it on the same axis as everything above it, and because fleece is a mid-layer rather than anything that handles 70 mph air. It is general winter apparel doing a motorcycle job, and we would rather say that than dress it up.
What we did not rank, and why
Heated grips are not on this page and they beat everything on it for a lot of riders, because cold hands stop you operating the controls long before a cold chest stops you riding. They are also permanently attached to one bike and do nothing for the back of your hand, which is the side the wind hits. We work the grips-versus-gloves question through properly in our cold-weather gear guide, and the short version is that the cheapest real upgrade is usually handguards.
Gerbing’s 12V EX Pro heated jacketis the outer-shell member of the Gerbing range and would have been an interesting fourth Gerbing. It is not ranked on availability: on 1 October 2026 the retailer we link listed it as “Only 2 left in stock” in the one size the search returned, which is not a listing we will send readers to. The Gerbing EX Pro 12V heated pants are in stock on the same date, and are named here rather than ranked because trousers are a different purchase and this page is about the upper body.
The Warm & Safe 110 W liner and the 7.4 V Tour Master Synergy jacket both exist, both are motorcycle-specific, and both were excluded on stock depth on 1 October 2026 — “Only 2 left” on the Warm & Safe and “Only 4 left” on the 7.4 V Synergy. The Warm & Safe figure is interesting enough to record: 110 watts would be the highest published output in this whole category if the listing were stocked.
SAVIOR HEAT and KEMIMOTO battery vestsare both cheaper than the ORORO and both were in stock on this date, and both are left unranked for the same reason: the listing titles do not map cleanly onto a single named model on the maker’s own site, so we cannot tie a specific ASIN to a specific published specification. We rank the SAVIOR HEAT and Kemimoto gloves on our heated gloves page, where that mapping is unambiguous. If your budget is under $100 and you want a battery vest, both brands are a reasonable gamble — we just will not pretend we verified which model you are getting.
Armored base layers get confused with heated ones often enough to be worth a sentence. They are the opposite product: no heat, but actual CE-rated impact protection, which nothing on this page has. If what you actually wanted was protection under a jacket rather than warmth, our armored base layers page is the one you want.
