This article offers a method to cool your car quickly on a hot day. Open the windows slightly, close them, then open and close the driver’s door quickly a few times to move ambient air in and out of the cabin.
I found that when I had a Honda, I could roll down all the windows and open the sunroof from 30 feet away. When I got to the car it was much cooler and easy to enter. My Tesla doesn’t have this feature but I’ve found that using a windshield sun block has a substantial positive effect. Anyone else have ways to cool the cabin quickly on a hot day?
Here is what works in the south… 1st off crack your windows just a tiny little bit unless you have rain deflectors, any amount helps…
Start the vehicle, roll windows down an inch or two, turn A/C on high but fresh air, once the cabin temp has equaled the ambient temperature, then turn on recirculate and roll up windows tight…
IF you start off on recirculate then you are trying to cool the cabin temp (say 120° plus) instead of the ambient temperature(say 95° plus), since it is easier to cool 95° air vs 120° air… with the windows cracked and the fresh air blowing in, you are pushing out the hotter air and bringing in much cooler air… Once on recirculate, you are now recirculating cooler than ambient temperature and every time it recirculates it gets cooler and cooler…If you keep it on fresh air then you will continue to try to cool off ambient temperature…
Tinted windows help to keep the cabin a little cooler, my truck with tinted windows and vent shades (rain deflectors) does get nearly as hot as my other vehicles without tinted windows and no vent shades… Both trucks have tined windows and vent shades…
About 1974 I had a new olds on my honeymoon. Ca4 was parked for a couple hours in the Texas sun at about. 110. I drove about 100 miles with the ac full blast until the car cooled down. Happy to get back to Minnesota.
Extra cost for the sunroof? Many car companies charge extra for the sunroof. Others, like Honda (in the US) include the sunroof in higher trim levels. That effectively makes it an extra cost option. If people want he least expensive models, that might keep them from buying the sunroof.
My method–which seems to work very well–is to us the “tilt” function of my sunroof when the vehicle is parked on a hot day, with the sun shade opened only about 1/2 inch, in order to prevent sun intrusion into the interior. That way, less hot air builds-up in the interior.
Then, when I start driving, I open both rear windows about an inch or so, while the A/C runs on the “fresh” air setting. Between the tilted sunroof and the slightly-open rear windows, the A/C is drawn through the interior.
After a few minutes, I close both the sunroof and the rear windows, and switch to “recirculate” if it’s an extremely hot day. Last year, I finally decided to test my cooled seats, and I found that this feature really does help on a hot day. Those cooled seats are especially nice if I am sweated-up when I return to the vehicle after a hike.
I just open the windows and use outside air for a minut or so, once the air out of the vents is cold, then close the windows and switch to recirculate. If I think about it, I might use the remote start function, but that’s very rare. Modern AC works very well, not like the leaky freon systems of the 50s-90s, though there were the sky is falling people that were of the belief that abandoning Freon, R12, would be the end of AC.
With my Highlander I’ll open the rear hatch and turn the AC on. This will blow the hot air out the back. Within a couple minutes the vehicle is a lot cooler. The window in rear hatch would roll down. That was a great way to cool the vehicle down quickly.
