Although BMW is renowned for dropping April Fools press releases every year, this isn’t one of them. The company is working on a heated seat for motorcycles that aims to be more effective by fooling riders into believing they’re warmer than they really are.

Newly published patent applications show that BMW is working on a method of illuminating sections of a bike’s seat, using it as an added means to feed information to the rider. The company has filed two separate patent documents with similar ideas, both related to making the seat take on a colored glow.

One patent suggests using a downward-facing lamp underneath the seat that can project colored light onto a surface below it that’s visible through a transparent or translucent front section of the seat itself. This light could be used to project colors or icons: BMW suggests a green battery icon could be used to stand for an electric bike’s state of charge, for instance, or that colors could be projected to “represent different vehicle states.”

Why red? Because this second patent is concerned specifically with heated seats. Instead of a simple, dash-mounted light or readout to tell you the seat heater is on, it suggests making the seat itself take on a rosy glow. And the idea isn’t purely a new way of getting information to the rider, as it’s intended to play on our natural tendency to believe that something lit in red is going to be warm to the touch.

The patent says: “It is generally known that the human perception of heat can be influenced by colors. At least based on everyday experiences, people associate warmth or heat with the color red. As a result, red or reddish colors always evoke a sense of warmth in humans, regardless of an actual ambient temperature.”

Going into more technical detail, the patent suggests supplying light at a wavelength between 380 nanometers and 780 nanometers when the heated seat is turned on. It even suggests the light could be made to shimmer, “in such a way that the user of the seat system can associate it with heat-giving embers,” and although the lighting only operates on the front section, just behind the fuel tank, since that’s the only part of the seat the rider can see, it gives them the impression the whole seat has taken on the same glow.