OP, you can always just do the experiment. Do baseline temperature measurements before, paint the roof white, then do the post-paint measurements. You are welcome to post the results here, then we’ll know for certain whether or how much painting helps. I expect you’d get the most bang for your buck by only painting the car’s roof. As a kid my family had both white & dark green ford sedans, and the green one definitely got hotter inside when sitting in the sun, engine off.
Like I said, post 41 already and just getting started as we take a diversion into coolers.
If my wife is shopping at a distance, she will take a cooler and put in a couple of those frozen containers for that purpose. Works well. No muss no fuss. Just throw them back in the freezer for the morning.
Paint the roof ? That will be expensive because he has a roof rack and the heat difference will be so small that he will regret the money spent for a long time. And there may be 2 other people who care about this but they might not ever see the results.
- Note tha many school buses have the roofs painted black. I understand painting the hood black but maybe they want to roast those little ANC’s biters in the summer. Maybe in Minnesota, heat is more important than cooling. Arizona may be different, or my memory is foggy.
How can the OP benefit by giving you the results? Paint your own roof and give him the results.
Perhaps to melt the ice, wrong color for hot climates. The buses in the southwest do not have black roofs and have air conditioners on the roof.
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White school bus roofs in Dallas.
Go get a price on just painting the roof vs the whole car, it is pretty high, when I had my Corolla’s roof painted due to the paint fading away to rust, it cost me $300, the place said they would paint the whole car for not much more, this was at Econo Paint, a higher end cheap paint shop… lol
All the school buses I see in my area have white roofs also, the buses are already like easy bake ovens, can’t imagine how hot they would be with a black roof…
Cermaic window tint would help keep the interior cool, 3m has a couple options but there are other brands out there. Costs more than other tint’s but it’s more effective if you do all the glass.
It occurs to me to me that the tests I did were with different vehicle designs.
I used to own a series of VW buses. The last one I had was white, and it got much less hot in the sun than my prior colored ones.
But VW buses (back then) had almost vertical windows. Even the windshield was much closer to vertical than most modern cars, let alone the Venza. So on the Venza, the large very slanted windshield and rear lift gate window account for a much part of the horizontal cross section - which means the Venza windows receive a larger fraction of the sunlight, especially mid-day.
Also, the VW buses were less streamlined too. Which perhaps meant that wind - true wind while the vehicle was standing still, effective wind while moving - maybe carried more of the heat away (??). (Incidentally, the VW windows, if opened, created much better ventilation and less road noise too, and the AC worked a lot better, though I don’t know if my Venza AC needs a recharge.)
Also the VW side windows were flat. I don’t recall, but I think I may eventually have placed window vents on them. The curved side windows of the Venza means that the most common brand of window vents wouldn’t stick long, because the curvature stresses the plastic - or at least they didn’t in a Honda CRV I had before the Venza.
So maybe the vehicle paint color is less relevant with modern streamlined vehicles like the Venza.
Also, my white VW Van was somewhat larger than my earlier VW vans, and had been customized by Westphalia as a camping van. E.g., its windows were probably more tinted. And it had a canvas “pop top”, so for overnight car camping, it got less hot and less humid inside (due to heat and moisture generated by my body), then my other VW vans, or than my Venza. Perhaps Westphalia did other things to keep it cooler. And the dashboard might not have been black, and it was certainly much smaller than the large black Venza dashboard. The seats were off-white, and I eventually put pure white seat covers on them. I have (Toyota brand) seat covers on the Venza, but they are grey. So the internal surfaces of the Venza might absorb proportionately more light.
In sum, it isn’t clear how well my earlier testing on old VW vans applies to my Venza. In fact, I even wonder how well single-vehicle-type tests apply to other vehicle types in general. Too many variables.
It doesn’t .
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Well boys, I may have been mistaken on the black roofs. There are approved bus colors that allows either orange or white roofs. Black trim required on the sides, so I dunno. Hard to see the tops from the ground but I’ll look more closely.
Still think it is a bad idea to spend the money on though. What are we up to now, 50?
Paint jobs are expensive.
Drive to Minnesota and pay @bing to do it.
@Bing isn’t saying he’ll do it for other people’s cars for $20. That’s how much it cost him in materials for his own car.
I repaired a curbed, broken-down bicycle back to usable condition for $75, but I’d have to charge at least $375 to do that for somebody else.
Yeah sure but I was 58 years younger then so you may not like the wait or the price.
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I had a body shop pain5 it. I did the prep and sanding, taping, removing bumpers etc, so all they had to do was shoot it. Paint was prolly $5 a quart then for duco enamel.
Doesn’t that misguide people? How is the relevant to the OP’s situation?
It isn’t. I was replying to RT’s post.