Who is the sadistic bastard responsible for designing the air conditioning in cars?
As I was driving back over to the coast in the heat, I noticed that my air conditioner has four fan settings: dead air, light draft, wimpy breeze, and HURRICANE ASSAULT!! And then I started thinking back to the cars I've owned, the cars I've rented... basically every car I've ever driven... and realized that they were all the same. For some reason, they skip 2 or 3 steps before you get to "HI" which means you either bake or freeze...
I spent most of the trip trying to come up with that magic combination of fan speed and temperature that would make me comfortable, but never managed to find it.
Eventually I shut the thing off and just rolled down the window.
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You really need to take a ride in my car when you come to LA…I think you’ll like the ride (yanno, cause I have extremely progressive a/c dials with multiple levels of comfort, not just cause it’s a fun ride).
My mom’s Cadillac is the same way, if the fan is on high, one button-push lower puts it on low. Medium does not exist.
aw look at how cute his tongue is
The latest stats on driving in cars says that you should keep the windows rolled up. People who get into car accidents and have their windows rolled partially down or completely down tend to get uh..decapitated and or suffer more head trauma than those with the windows rolled up. Which is all Spanish for Dead.
Air conditioning doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
the only problem I have with my AC is that when I turn it off, it starts slowly spewing warm air. So you either get cold air of warm air. You cant have nothing. Sometimes, all I want is just plain NOTHING.
air conditioning dries my eyeballs out.
I’m partial to Hurricane Assault, myself.
You do realize that many people pay huge amounts of $$$ for hair product that does step #4 to their hair for them….like, intentionally and on purpose. And without cold air.
I’m a window’s girl – the AC never really goes on in my car unless it’s REALLY hot!
Dave’s hair looks pretty hot at hurricane assault level…
I use full Hurricane Assault until the inside of the car feels like a refrigerator. Then I get out of the car and can’t see a damn thing because my sunglasses are frozen over.
I’m with you on this Dave. Though recently my A/C fan has been acting up. Just in time for the Ontario heatwave last week 🙂
It is not PC to have the air conditioning on in a MINI. The rule is anything over 40 degrees = sunroof open and windows down. Even when it’s 140. Stupid cult…
…it’s aaalways somethin’, as Rosann-rosanna-danna used to say…
I don’t have a problem with the fan settings as much as I do with the actual air vents. In my car I can either have the air blowing my hair or my chest. I just want cold air on my face, like sticking my head in the freezer, without having to lean like I forgot my V8 this morning.
This is just fun. Love the illustrations.
Because of the Mini “cult rule” I rarely ride in RW’s Gracie unless it’s below 70 degrees. My car, on the other hand has an automatic thermostat that makes it comfortable no matter what the temperature outside is. It has heated seats for the winter and cools off perfectly within minutes. I love my car.
I don’t understand. Why would one want anything other than Hurricane Assault? I’m with Avi, but only in the sense that I like my Nature like I like my monkeys, on the other side of the glass, and so want my temperature to be frigid in summer. Not in any way that includes nudity.
uugghh… imagine this is your life all year long… Last night at 2 am i was driving home in 87 degree weather and sweating. Summer in Florida is brutal.
I turn it on full blast and aim every vent away from me.
I just made it to the coast. I took an unexpected road trip (seriously unexpected) and ended up in Seattle then drove back down 101 to Eugene.
I do the same thing with the combination of fan speed and temp, but also add in the equation of vent closure and broadcast angle. It gets pretty complex when you’re all said and done. And they thought talking on your cell phone was a distraction!
Agree with Brandi…it’d probably work best to just leave it on Hi and point the vents elsewhere. That way, it’ll cool the cabin as a whole (over time) and not blow you away. I usually will have one vent blowing just over my head and another just to the side. Does the trick every time.
Funny, eighty years ago no one’s car had any AC to bitch about. Actually, they didn’t have any windows to roll down, either.
I’m of the mindset that things are much better now. But I guess you gotta have something to write about. Slow blog day, Dave?
I do think the graphic’s cute.
Since I’m not living 80 years ago, I wouldn’t know.
What did you write in YOUR blog today?
Seems like 90% of things are designed this way.
They should have 0 to 10 where 10 is overkill most of the time and divide the rest accordingly.
Electric car seats annoy the crap out of me: With the mechanical ones you pick the best one and adapt. With electrial ones you can never find the same setting twice (unless it has memory), and are constantly adjusting/searching for the “just right” setting.
I think I’ve finally mastered the “MAX” setting or “RECIRC” setting on the A/C. Forever, I just thought it made the A/C blow harder, but then it finally dawned on me that the little icon that shows air recirculating actually means it’s just taking the air from inside the car and re-coldifying it instead of taking it from outside. So on really really hot days, when it’s hotter inside than out, I start off on normal, and then when it gets a pinch colder inside, I switch it to MAX/RECIRC for that extra cold sensation.
Hahaha lol! Congratualations for managing to enduce a real lol from me Dave…not just one of those fake ‘I am slightly amused internally but am not actually showing physical signs of laughing out loud’ lol’s. In my 17 years experience crappy to non-existent aircon can be sufficiently dealt with by rolling down the windows- PROVIDED you have pale leather seats and a pale coloured vehicle; heaven help you if they’re dark coloured- black cars in the sun are like mobile ovens. Fabric seat covers suck because they get all itchy when you get hot, and food crumbs that are caught in the fibres end up sticking to your bare legs which is one of my all-time greatest nightmares.
Well of course you’re not living 80 years ago! 🙂 But you HAVE seen those cars. So you and I CAN imagine what a mother-loving bear it would have been to trundle around in the heat in those things … at 25 miles per hour, to boot!
But you make a good point. I didn’t write anything in my blog that day. My blogging exercises have been fits and stops of progress. At the end of it all while I found my life eminently entertaining for myself, I didn’t always have something of substance to write about that I thought would entertain others. And I have usually found that you have something entertaining to say.
So I comment on other’s writing and hope most of the time to have something positive to contribute. And I occasionally tease … only those whose writing I enjoy.
Re:
“…just taking the air from inside the car and re-coldifying it instead of taking it from outside.”
I love ‘re-coldifying’, and I think we must have some brain wiring in common, Wayne. I’ve found myself saying ‘un-get-hold-of-able’, ‘disinflaming’ (what Ibuprofen does), and since I’m drawing a blank for a third good example, I’ll offer my occasional misusage of ‘sextiary’ (like the ordinal ‘secondary’ only for the number 6) just to throw people off … I love playing with words/usage and making shit up.