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It just has a different feel, you know?
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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I know it's a meme, but I'm going to rant for a bit.
The MT version of the air conditioner is the two knobs, one for temp and the other for fan speed. The AT is the temp setting where you pick a temp and the air blows until it's that temperature.
And the MT is far superior in every way. Most car trips, you're not in your car long enough to stabilize the temp, and if you're like me, you never bother with anything between max cool and max heat anyway.
If you're not in the car long enough to stabilize the temperature, then you're close enough to bike.
You try riding a bike in a foot of snow for 15 miles to the grocery when it's -10F outside, then carry a week's groceries for your family in your backpack. I'll wait.
'Cuz that's a realistic scenario, mm-hmm.
If you live 15 miles from the grocery store in a place that gets a lot of snow, it most certainly is. Not everywhere in the world is LA.
The number of people who live in such a situation is a rounding error in the population of L.A., though. It’s also a strange response to my observation that it’s a really short trip if your car A/C doesn’t have time to get cold.
That's a badly designed town. You should be able to do your shopping within reasonable walking distance - you know you want poor people to not need to own a car, you want health conscious people do a little bit of active travel when they need groceries
I live about as far from a supermarket as you can in my town, so two are each about 5km (3 miles) away, with both having a small collection of shops, and the supermarket occupying less than a quarter of the centre
I also recall watching a video from one of the Nordic countries on the subject of cycling in winter
Their method: wear warm clothes
They had an advantage though in that loads of people ride there
My wife, kids, and dog don't fit on my bike.
Depending on the kids ages, they also can ride, or ride in a trailer. The dog can ride in a basket or trailer depending on size
Go for a Dutch style cargo bike and the kids and dog can ride up front in the tub
Surely the real reason is the terrible bike infrastructure where you live
We have some excellent bike trails, but getting around town is problematic. I work from home, so I no longer have to commute, but when I did, it was too far to reasonably bike. It's not safe to take the kids riding on the highways, but we're close enough to the elementary school to bike there when the weather is nice.
I'm an advocate for biking, but it's not a realistic replacement for a car where I live. You can't load up like a pack mule every time you want groceries or to go to a little league game.
That’s very sad, and you have my sympathies. I wish that more places were designed so that kids could have a “free-range childhood.” The benefits to their physical, mental, and emotional development are significant, versus having to be carted around everywhere. Not to mention the burden on parents of being forced to be chauffeurs.
I lived a free range childhood in a neighborhood with sidewalks, where we could bike everywhere and walk to and from elementary school. We still had a family minivan, and my dad commuted to work. My kids can still ride their bikes around our neighborhood, but our world is bigger than our neighborhood. They have friends that live on the other side of mountains and highways. They have hiking trails and music lessons and sports and dance and theater, and hardly any of that would be possible on bikes because you can't fit baseball diamonds next to theaters next to music halls and national parks and art studios unless you live inside a major city. When I was a kid, we would all meet at the dirt piles behind the middle school and then go explore storm drains.
I enjoyed my childhood, but I don't lament that my kids have more options and opportunities than I did. Yes, we need a car to drive them around to play with their friends or attend events, and I enjoy being engaged in their lives and watching them enjoy the things they learn. But they still have summer days where the neighborhood kids meet at the creek and try to catch minnows.
Things change.
“Max cool / max heat only” is for troglodytes. While I agree that the auto-settings are ~useless, the One True Method is to keep the fan speed on low to maintain airflow and adjust the temp for comfort.
That's my strategy most of the time except during prime time Oklahoma Summers and Winters. Once it's over 100 or below 10, it becomes a max heat/cool game otherwise it would do nothing to combat the temperature
Nah. I like just leaving it on Auto with 70-72 °F. It blasts the fan to cool off or warm up quick in extreme temps, then calms down once it gets closer to the temp.
Why use the air at all if you don't want it warmer or cooler? And if you want it warmer or cooler, why not use the max setting until it reaches the desired temperature? You're using the same amount of energy, it just takes longer and you're uncomfortable longer.
Because moving air keeps the cabin from getting stuffy. I’ll crank it to the extremes to get the bulk of the temperature change done, but then dial it in to a comfortable neutral temperature once that’s accomplished.
So you do what I do exactly, but you use buttons to adjust a temperature rather than turning dials to set the temp and airflow, which is objectively worse.
Preach. I much prefer it heating and cooling faster than it throttling itself because you don't have it set high or low enough.
I actually like the quieter settings better most of the time. Just a low breeze, so I might be the target audience for automatic.
I do in every season except summer, really.
It doesn't heat or cool faster, this is simply the interface we're talking about. They both do heating and cooling at the exact same speed and power, and they both stop heating and cooling the instant the ambient temperature reaches whatever temp you set the controls to. The only difference is one is controlled by a dial and the other uses buttons.
No, the former doesn't involve a thermostat.
I'm essentially certain that it does. How do you think the heat/cool slider dial works? It's the same as an analog thermostat in a house. Turning the dial further to the heat side doesn't make the air coming out of the vent any hotter, it just controls when the heating should automatically turn off.
Actually, it blends the hot air and cold air. No thermostat involved
Interesting to know, but presumably it doesn't change the main point, which is that a digitally controlled system presumably still shoots out the same maximum amount of heat per second as the analog dial controlled system can do. Like a house window air conditioner has 2 states: creating the maximum amount of cold air per second that it's able to do, and off. The digital control on the AC is simply a thermostat that tells it when to turn the cooling on or off. I presume the digitally controlled car heater works the same way, when the ambient temperature is much colder than the thermostat is set to, then it will put out the maximum amount of heat per second that it's able to produce, which is the same amount as the analog slider system can produce.
Automotive A/Cs with an automatic temperature control instead of the knobs actually will cool faster with it set to the minimum temperature. All you're doing when you increase the temperature is adding heat to the cold air, therefore it takes longer to cool the interior down compared to setting it to Lo.
I am very much not like you. I want the air to be a comfortable temp so if I can't roll the windows down because of rain or crazy weather I set it to the temp I want and let the fan circulate the air.
So what's your ideal temp? Is it the same if you've been to the gym while your car bakes in the parking lot on a summer day? How about when it's been snowing all night and your windows are completely fogged and your gloves are wet from clearing off the snow?
You're saying in those situations, you don't just set the temp as low or as high as it can go and have it run full blast? How frequently do you need air conditioning while it's raining, but not to clear fog from the windshield?
Sure, I suppose if you're in the car long enough, you might want to turn the temp to a moderate level, and turn down the fan speed, but those are things you can do without taking your eyes off the road. God forbid your "auto" aircon is controlled via a touchscreen.
If the car is hot, the automatic aircon will operate at maximum cool until the temperature is brought down to the set point. Likewise when the car is colder than you want
Of course you move the set point up or down a bit between summer and winter, and depending on how you feel at the time
Max cool gets too cold if you're aircon is working properly
Full blast is reserved for when first getting in when it is crazy hot or cold, but once it gets to a reasonable temp (or starts at one) then just somewhere in the middle based on whether the sun is on my side or it is humid or something.
Right now I have the temp setting and it is somewhere between 68 and 75 depending on whether it feels hot or cold and I just change it a degree or two until it feels right. Ideal temp just means I feel comfortable, and what I am wearing and the temp I came from changes that. Have little paddle flippers to adjust so easy as a finger flick to adjust and having physical controls for the a/c was a requirement when I bought my car.
The transmission doesn't control the air conditioner
My 98 automatic truck has 3 knobs. Fan speed, temperature, and source (head, feet, both, etc.).
Sorry, no, I meant that as an analogy. The image OP posted referred to a hand fan as the "manual" version of air conditioning, but I disagree.
I see that.
I'm still curious about why you don't think that the "automatic" is good, though.
In my MT AC I can pick max cold, max hot, or somewhere in the middle by mixing cold and hot.
The AT AC can do max cold, max hot, and then gives you numbers for the middle.
If I want my MT AC truck to be middle temperature, I have to crank the heat until it gets hot and then manually turn down the temperature until I'm comfortable at half.
If I got into an AT AC truck then I could just set the temperature to half and it will automatically crank the heat until it gets hot and then automatically turn down the temperature until I'm comfortable at half.
Other than AT AC having more stuff to break and higher cost of repair. AT AC gives you the same temperature experience without you having to turn the knob multiple times. It automatically does it for you.
Because getting from max hot to max cold means pressing a button up or down for each degree. And there is lag between the car temp sensor detecting the current temp and the change in air temp and fan speed. On top of all that, the human body doesn't have a thermostat. What feels comfortable depends on your internal body temp, humidity, how sunny it is, what activities you've just done or will do, what you're wearing, and how many other people are in the car. This information cannot be summarized in a single number. It doesn't give you what you want automatically, and you need to tweak it up and down anyway.
Instinctively, you know exactly whether you want hot or cold air and how strong you want it to blow. I could either turn two knobs to get exactly what I want, or I could press buttons to guess at the temperature that is going to trick the automated systen into giving me what I want without knowing if I will need to make additional adjustments later. Worse still, making adjustments means taking my eyes off the road to see what number I've put into the system. This problem is compounded exponentially if the car has a touch screen and I need to navigate menus to adjust the AC.
The worst part about it is that it's entirely unnecessary. The knobs worked fine. Some older cars has sliders ir buttons, but knobs seemed to be the thing everyone liked, and the automated system didn't improve on that. You still have to adjust the air, but the interface to make adjustments is objectively worse.
They were making an analogy that fit better than OP, not actually suggesting air con was affected by what kind of gearbox your car has.
I’ve never driven an auto that didn’t have a two-knob AC
Sorry, that's not what I meant. It was a metaphor. Manual AC is better than Auto AC.
Oh I get it now. I’m dumb
Nah, I wrote it poorly and it was confusing.
MT isn't superior in stop and go traffic in a city with a lot of hills.
Current ATs shift way better than most people would manually. Setting your AC to 75 doesnt mean the air coming out of the vent is 75°. People on here complaining about AT and aircons while apparently never having used them.
Youre right
Big "Meh" on that statement. I drive a manual, and for a vacation, drove an Toyota Camry automatic. It had like 10 gears, and would take a while to search for the gear you wanted, and by the time it found it, it would need to be in a different powerband, so it would immediately pop out, search again...Rinse and repeat. On the flip side, my partner has a Honda with a CVT, and it is a much better automatic in my opinion. Easy power transition, no jerks, always at the right ratio, it really is fantastic. You might get a little hesitation if you absolutely slam the accelerator to the floor, but it is otherwise fairly responsive.
Youre right, 'current ATs' is too general. What I meant was it is not like the technology itself is lacking. There are fantastic ATs by now, but old and cheap cars probably still have problems.