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.
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.
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.
if you’re like me, you never bother with anything between max cool and max heat anyway.
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.
Completely and wholly agree. I fucking hate driving automatics with transmissions that don’t shift like I do. Especially ones that let the engine rev way up before shifting even when not really accelerating fast. Such a waste of gas.
Don’t get me started on those fucking temperature settings… If it’s 100+F, I don’t want fucking 75 degree air coming at me at any point in time. I want ice cubes. I also enjoy not accidentally cracking my windshield with heat stress in the winter when the half-defrost setting randomly turns to high heat.
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.
Not everyone is driving a new car. There are older automatics, even ones after 2000, that behave as I described.
I didn’t say it was all automatics. I said I especially hate ones like those.
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.
This feels like I’m being attacked for driving a manual clapped out civic with poor AC…damn I’m broke cuz
Credit to ciko22ie below for the assist. Should’ve known the link wouldn’t have been enough to embed the image .
saved you a click
Transmission choice is very condition dependent. America has a lot of flat straight roads. This fits automatic transmission very well. The car can easily predict when you will want to change gears.
Conversely Europe has a lot of curving and/or hilly roads. This changes the dynamics. You often want to hold off on a gear change, due to road conditions ahead. This is easy in a manual car, but is frustrating in an automatic. You either change too early, and so have to downshift when you enter the corner or hill, or it over revs on the straights.
It’s a dying question however. Electric cars don’t need either manual or automatic gearboxes.
I dont know if youve recently used an automatic but my 2017 Audi A3 shifts extremely well on european streets, never had any problems or efficiency issues. I would say it shifts way better than most people could manually. Also with automatics theres not even a need to ‘hold back on a shift’, it can just shift and then shift back in a split second without any noticable change in momentum. I think what you are describing might have been a problem years ago.
Right. Modern, well-tuned AT can out shift about 95% of drivers on the road, in every situation. Plus a lot of them have sport mode and steering wheel paddles for manual control, if you want to roll that way.
It’s definitely improved, but it feels distinctly different to drive. Also, not all cars do it as well as that, some (cheaper) cars are still quite clunky with it.
Beyond that, their inertia effects. If you’re used to manual, an automatic feels “wrong”. Therefore most car buyers buy manual. This means most 2nd hand cars are also manual. This makes automatics more expensive and so even less desirable. I suspect America has the opposite situation.
Most people don’t buy manuals everywhere in Europe anymore. Most people here in Norway have turned to automatic already.
Your last argument is probably accurate but just shows how little thought people give to big decisions like buying a car. Thats like bathing in mud for years and when someone offers you a shower youre like ‘nah Im kinda not used to that, Ill keep buying mud’. Also most people are used to manual because automatics havent been around forever, including myself. It doesnt feel wrong at all for me, got used to it on the first day.
It’s not about the shift itself. It’s about how long it takes from the input of my foot, to the power at the wheels.
A great example is spontaneous overtaking. For my taste, it takes way too long for the AT to shift down, while with MT I can shift down before I press the accelerator.
That, and getting stuck in snow or dirt. With MT you can also sort of sway yourself out of a problem.
Anyway, preference, etc. Both has pros and cons, it’s up to the driver to decide what pros matter to them.
You’d be surprised at how good the tech in modern cars is.
In addition, another thing rarely mentioned, automatic transmission works better with automatic security features, making them a safer choice.
Here in Norway they plan to phase out teaching just manual transmission entirely due to these reasons. In the future, if you want a driver’s license, you will get taught automatic at least.
The other reason is likely that electric cars are all automatic, teaching people manual would be extremely redundant since Norway will be phasing out ICE vehicles relatively soon.
Sorry I like better fuel economy and support the Right to Repair
I do prefer manuals. But the fuel economy of autos largely surpassed manuals a few years ago. Can’t beat 10 speeds or a cvt with a stick shift.
For new cars, sure, but I’ll be dammed if I let anyone tell me that my shitbox(es) would be more efficient as an auto
Oh for sure. Old autos were terribly inefficient.
Yep with CVTs you can basically maintain a constant RPM when driving. There’s no way you can drive manuals as smoothly as a CVT.
I bet you I can
It’s more fun!
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Windows down is the best!
4 40 AC all the way, baby
I’m in this meme and I don’t like it.
I legit drive a manual and use a hand fan all summer. Not at the same time tho
I learned to drive with MT and now I drive with AT. It’s just way too much comfortable.
MT in a grocery-getter/going-to-work-machine is rather pointless, in my opinion. Manual transmission cars get boring pretty quickly during city driving, traffic jams etc…
In a sporty car on a winding mountain/country road, however… ah, so satisfying to row your own gears during a bit of spirited driving.
Man, so many people on Lemmy just don’t live in reality. Everything some of you guys say is just theory on paper based on a vision of the world that doesn’t and never has existed. The shit some people on this website suggest is just comical, like they’ve really never thought about what they’re even advocating for more than a second and realized all that it actually entails. Y’all need jobs and bills to pay.
new copypasta?
It’s also a cultural thing. Here manual transmission for fuel powered car cars is the most popular choice by far. People here sort of think that automatic is for people that can’t drive or old people.
This is devastating. I’m devastated right now.
If automatic transmission had come first, manuals would never be permitted because it takes away attention from driving and is less safe. The only reason anyone considers manuals okay is because they came first and it’s baked into our perception that they’re a normal way to control a vehicle.
People will say that soon it becomes second nature and you don’t have to think about it…and this is mostly true…but it still takes up ‘processor cycles’ in our brain. More notably, our brains are finicky and can easily shift what they are focusing on and what they are autopiloting.
Personal anecdote: I have a manual because at the time it was the best vehicle I could find that fit my budget, it’s only real issue was being manual. I have gotten used to driving it, and it is in fact second nature most of the time. The other day I was at an intersection; the car in front of me went, and my mind focused on the shifting for a moment - my brain decided to put the driving on ‘autopilot’ instead of the shifting. In that brief moment, when I was more focused on shifting than the road situation, I nearly drove out in front of an oncoming vehicle. Had they not honked I may have failed to notice until a collision occurred.
That distraction could have been any number of things. A wholly undistracted driver is an impossibility. But in this case, it was shifting, something that could have been wholly unnecessary and therefore not been there to distract at all.
This post is hilarious. You obviously have no experience with manual transmission. Following your logic radios an anything you handle there should be forbidden too.
Do you have to look away from the road every time you push the blinker stalk? Do you accidently flash incoming traffic everytime it starts to rain? There’s a lot of things you already have to do in a car at once. Operate at least two pedals, a steering wheel, a few stalks and buttons, observe and obey traffic signage, observe and predict the actions of other drivers, navigate, deal with passengers, adapt to road conditions, etc. There’s so much to think about, and frankly operating a clutch and stick is easier to do than a lot of these individually.
The other day I was at an intersection; the car in front of me went, and my mind focused on the shifting for a moment - my brain decided to put the driving on ‘autopilot’ instead of the shifting. In that brief moment, when I was more focused on shifting than the road situation, I nearly drove out in front of an oncoming vehicle. Had they not honked I may have failed to notice until a collision occurred.
Clearly it’s not second nature yet. Keep practicing. I know that feeling you’re talking about, that draw of focus. It’s not your brain picking a new focus willy-nilly - it’s a lapse in your shifting muscle memory, forcing you to engage more consciously. I get that feeling every time I get a car new to me, manual or not. You just have to learn it.
Hell, I’ve been driving manuals for pretty much my whole life, and I can share counter-anecdotes of me having similar lapses when I had to drive an auto. Last time I did, I slammed my left foot into the brake pedal to instinctively press the clutch that wasn’t there, and was momentarily distracted from the road when I tried to shift into low with the wiper stalk (mountain road). And this was a car that I had daylied years prior. You just need to get familiar with your car. Practice practice.
So you’re arguing that anything invented for cars that make them less easy to operate would never be permitted? So like, have you never seen a sports car? Those are 100% irrelevant for road use but are still quite legal. They have lots of features and more you can turn on that make driving it more effort than standard cars.
And before you say, “sports cars have a purpose that call for those features”. No, they don’t actually. Sports cars don’t need any of those features for normal road use and actually making use of many of them would cause you to be driving illegally. They are track-only as designed. But manual transmissions do still have uses that automatic transmissions fail to cover: Non-standard roads. High-grade hills, non-paved surfaces, cold-weather, etc.
My CVT does a great job on steep cobblestone roads in winter. It allows me to also keep two hands on the wheel to help keep the car pointed in the right direction when snow pulls me around.
I think you need a little more practice with your manual. If you’re focusing on going, you should already be in first, and just managing the throttle and clutch. Once you’re rolling, it takes no brain power at all to disengage the clutch, pop straight down to second and engage the clutch. You’re not doing 16 shifts to get through an intersection Fast and Furious style.
Sorry. You’re just bad at manual transmission… I’d argue the required extra attention needed to drive with manual transmission might actually be positive to make sure you’re not zoning out
