Summer special: Does leaving the sunroof shade open, affect your AC's performance?
By now, you must have seen the ultimate Indian automobile AC test on our website. To keep with the whole theme, we've been putting out other related stories too â€" Ferrari's advanced AC technology, how to use your AC effectively, the dark days before AC was standard OEM fitment and the effect of AC on efficiency and performance. If you're a motorcyclist, we've also got a story on how to stay cool on a bike. Now we've got another one, and it involves sunroofs. Do they affect how long it takes to cool your car? We're not talking about when they're open, but when the glass is shut, and the shade isn't. For our test, we took two Hyundai Elantras â€" one with a sunroof and one without. They were of the same colour too â€" silver. We conducted the test the same way we did for all the other cars and collected the data.
The results showed that the initial rate of cooling for both cars were similar, with the temperature dropping to around 32áµ'C in the first four minutes. However, after that, there were fluctuations in the cabin temperature of the car with the sunroof. For instance, at the six-minute mark, the cabin temperature in that car went up by around half a degree, whereas in the car without the sunroof, the temperature had dropped by 1.7 degrees. At the end of the 10-minute run, the temperature in car with the sunroof had fallen to 30.8 degrees while in the other car, the temperature went down to 28.7 degrees. It took another three and a half minutes before the temperature in the sunroof-equipped Elantra hit 28.8 degrees. So evidently, leaving the sunroof's shade open in your car does affect how long it takes for the cabin cool.