I need a friendly frost giant.
I need one in my car.
I need one in my pocket.
Why do I need a frost giant in my car? To cool it off, of course.
The previous Mazda 3 had marginal air conditioning for a Texas summer. If the car didn't sit in the sun too long, the A/C was fine. If it got very hot, the A/C would eventually be fine, but it could take a loooong time to initially cool the car down. On a 105 degree day, parking in the sun for an hour meant the A/C blew warm the first few minutes, cool another five, and after ten was blowing cold air. By then you could be soaked. The only saving grace twas that by the time the temperature was that high, the humidity was low. I usually drove home with the air off and windows down; evaporative cooling worked better than the A/C those days.
Our new 3, a five door, has a larger passenger compartment (18% bigger because storage is inside, not in the trunk), has the same A/C, which struggles even harder.
Mazda is hardly alone in this. Most cars apparently are neither designed for, nor tested in, climates like those of the southern US.
Why do I need a frost giant in my pocket? To cool my phone off, of course.
My smart phone already has plenty of problems, documented elsewhere. But another problem is that it just can't cope with the Texas heat. If it's in my pocket or a fanny pack (while running) on a 100+ degree day for even a half hour, it needs to be shut off and put somewhere cool for a bit or (a) the battery discharges crazily fast and (b) the phone just locks up.
This is poor design and poor testing. I don't know the actual numbers, but a decent percentage of North American car and phone customers (among others) live in climates that get pretty hot or pretty cold. The products need to be designed and tested for these extremes.
We should all be demanding this of the manufacturers and voting with our dollars.
Recommendations for well designed, climate robust products welcome.
