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Comment by causi | Hacker News Reader

I love having a dumb car. My wife has a modern car and my experience is superior in almost every way. She has to select a temperature and then her AC system blasts her with freezing or burning air until it decides the car is at the desired temperature. Since the selector only goes down to 65, it's impossible to get medium-temperature air on a nippy day. My dash, on the other hand, has a dial that goes from cold to hot, and I can make the air come out at exactly the temperature I want. She has a button to select where the air comes out and has to cycle through the head/foot/defrost/etc options and then wait for a motor to get what she wants. Mine is a mechanical dial I can turn to any setting instantly with no motor to break later on.

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Its too bad your experience with automatic climate control systems is so terrible. I'm of the exact opposite experience. I recently had to have my car in the shop and as a rental they gave me a mid-tier level Nissan Sentra with manual climate controls. I absolutely hated having to manually adjust the climate, usually 2-3 times every trip. Why would I want to fiddle with climate controls when it could be entirely automated?

I haven't really had to adjust the climate controls in my current car since I bought it, aside from pressing the defrost button a few times. During that time outside temperatures have ranged from 15F to 110F, and my car is always comfortable inside. Even the heated steering wheel and heated seats are automatic, I haven't had to manually control those either. Automatic climate control has worked very well for me across 4 different models of cars ranging from a 2000 Honda Accord, a 2012 Ford Focus, a 2017 Hyundai Santa Fe, and a 2021 Mustang Mache E. All of them pretty much never required me to adjust it day to day, and I would go weeks to months without needing to do anything.

Given that you're talking about only being able to set the temperature selector down to 65, it sounds like you're doing automatic climate control wrong. You're going to have a bad experience if you're always setting it to max cold or max heat instead of just picking a comfortable temperature in the middle and letting the car get to that temp. Sure, it'll take a minute or two before it starts blowing air, because usually the AC needs to really start cranking before its doing anything or it takes a bit for the heater core to warm. During that time you're not really doing much blowing around the air, in fact you might make the experience in the car worse blowing non-conditioned air around.

Just like in your house, setting your AC unit to 60F isn't going to make your AC unit run harder. Do you go to your home thermostat and drag it all the way one way when you're warm, then drag it all the way to the other direction when you're cold? No, you set it for a comfortable temperature and let the system hold it there.

You're going to have a bad experience if you're always setting it to max cold or max heat instead of just picking a comfortable temperature in the middle and letting the car get to that temp.

That's the issue. Suppose the car is at an ambient temperature of 50 degrees. I get in and start it up. I want air that's just slightly warmer than ambient but I can't get it. If I set it to 65, I get hit with air that's probably 90 degrees until the whole car hits 65, meanwhile I'm sweating like it's high summer. If I set it to Low, the only setting below 65, it turns me into a frozen dinner. Generally I'm forced to keep the AC off and just be slightly cold because I have no direct control of the air that's hitting me. There's no way to tell the car to blow slightly warm air if the ambient temperature is below 65 degrees.

Your car's automatic climate control system seems terribly designed and not like any one I've ever experienced. The climate control system on my Accord came out in 1996 and it behaved far superior to that. It doesn't just blow max heat/cold until the target temperature, it does a reasonable gradient of temperature differences until its the target temp keeping in mind some kind of comfort profile. This has been the way every other automatic climate control system I've used has behaved, I've never experienced it blasting heat/cold as hard as can be full bore, unless it legitimately needed that to keep up with the losses (having the windows open).

I'm sorry your experiences suck and you have to manually adjust your AC system dozens of times per drive to make your car comfortable. Personally though I see that as a massive step back, not an improvement. Would you mind sharing the make of car so I can be sure to avoid it?

Also, when talking about automatic climate control, do you also have it set to automatic fan speed as well, or just temperature? Maybe your system would perform better if you let it also control the fan speed if you aren't already. For my experiences I pretty much always let directionality, fan speed, and temperature set to be automatically controlled.

I'm glad to hear they're improving. Maybe by the time I have to replace my car I won't have any complaints.

I'm with the other guy - I've owned my car for 8 years and never touched the climate control except to set it to 24 in the winter and 22 in the summer. Otherwise I just let it do its thing, which works great. 2013 Audi A4, btw.

My top gripe about my wife's smart car: She sometimes leaves it with the radio on. A few seconds after bootup (starting the car), the radio starts playing. But it won't listen to the on/off button yet, not for several more seconds. So if I don't want the radio on, I have no way to shut it off until it will let me.

Both my cars have that misfeature, but vary in details. Both take just long enough to start playing that they usually start blaring music as I'm backup up. Nor have I found any way to disable the feature on either. It took months for me to get into the habit of sitting and waiting for it to boot so I could turn it off before I start driving.

The Honda CR-V is like you say, it will only turn on if you had the radio on when the car was shut off (makes sense), but turns on long before it is capable of responding to the off button.

The Chevy Bolt infuriatingly turns on (almost) every time you get in the car regardless of whether the radio was on or not when you last used it. For the life of me I cannot figure out what heuristics cause it to (very rarely) not turn on. At least its off button is functional at the time it starts playing.

For the Bolt - was it connected to Bluetooth when the car turned off?

I don't know. My phone isn't paired with the car, but my wife's is. If I drive the grocery store and back, the radio will always turn on when I'm leaving the house (after the wife used it last), and it will usually (but not always) turn on as I'm leaving the grocery store. It is possible that the car is intermittently connecting with her phone (which is inside the house) before I leave. In any case though, it always starts up playing radio even if it was playing via bluetooth on the last trip (and that same phone connects with the same apps open).

When I added a modern stereo with Android Auto/CarPlay to my 2003 vehicle, I found that many modern car stereos are designed to never be turned off. There was no off switch. So, if you start the car to let it warm while you shovel the driveway, you couldn't listen to your phone with bluetooth headphones, as it would connect to the car stereo, that you couldn't turn off with the car running.

I fixed it by wiring a simple toggle switch into the the power line for the stereo and mounting it in the dash. Problem fixed. "Off" shuts off the stereo instantly.

You might be able to read up on your model/package and do this, or consult a car stereo installation shop to do this.

Automatic climate control has been around for about 40 years and common for 20 years. There is no excuse for not getting it right in 2022. I had cars 20 years ago that had great auto climate control.

> I love having a dumb car.

Did you find a newish one?

Nope, mine's a 2007. Still going strong.

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