I’ve only ever owned 3 vehicles but even the cars I’ve borrowed or rented the feet heat always sucks it just blows it straight forward back into the engine rather than down at my feet, I always have to shove my feet directly up into the dash to get heat, is there a reason we can’t adjust the feet vent or any other solution?
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Mercedes S class (2006+) had a feature where you could set the foot temperature to be lower or higher by up to 3 degrees (celsius)
So,get a Benz
The SL has that and the air scarf feature, they’re a dream on cold days.
Try a jeep jk. It’ll cook your feet
Or any regular cab pickup made in the last 15 years. They design the climate control with the volume of a crew cab in mind, so a small regular cab can get completely cooked by the heater or cooled by the A/C in less than 5 minutes.
Automotive HVAC engineer here. At least where I work, these floor ducts are fixed and do not have positionable vents like the ones on the dash. The nozzles on the floor ducts are ideally aimed to hit both pedals and the dead pedal. You car might not have great floor duct aiming.
Generally speaking, floor aiming isn’t super important for cabin comfort. These ducts are supposed to be used for heating. The gentle heat coming from these ducts will radiate throughout the cabin.
If your car has automatic climate control, use it. The system will know what to do based on the current coolant temperature and the temperature outside. Leave it at 72F like you would your house.
When you come home on a hot day and you turn on your home’s AC, you don’t drop it down to 60F. You leave around 72 and the AC cools it down. Your car is the same way. Don’t jack up or down the set point hoping to cool or warm the cabin better.
Any tips to save gas during winter? Should I just leave the settings on auto and call it a day ?
Treat it as you would your home thermostat is the exact verbiage I’ve always used with the auto setting
I have tried to explain this to everyone with automatic climate control: Changing the temperature does not heat or cool the car any faster.
Yes it does.
It’s usually about the fan speed, not the temperature. I’ve never had a car with auto climate control that manages the fan speed in the manner I’d like it to. Sometimes you just want to be personally blasted with cold or hot air, and aren’t as worried about the cabin temperature. Sometimes it’s the opposite - my old Audi LOVED to crank the fans until it got to the set temperature regardless of how uncomfortable it made me as the driver.
I’m sure newer systems are better but this was always a big turnoff.
Do you guys take into account the ambient temperature? I find when it’s cold as heck my floors tend to stay cold & my feet stay cold even on longer trips.
On the same note, I find the transmission tunnel stays warmer in the summer & I need to turn the AC fan to a higher speed to compensate.
Yeah that is BS comparing it to a house HVAC. A house HVAC runs at 100% until the temp is reached. A car will for some dumb reason run softly if I set it to 75 and it’s 90 in my car. I max it out hot or cold until I am comfortable and then set the auto.
I just hate not being able to control fan speed. I drive form long stretches so don’t care if it takes an extra 15 minutes to warm the cabin. I don’t want a 75db fan noise.
if i leave my cc on auto it leaves ac on. i dont want ac in the winter.
??
Your home AC is literally on or off so of course you don’t drop it to 60. You’re comparing apples to oranges.
And I’m pretty sure not all automatic climate control also has automatic fan control.
Also sometimes I absolutely want to be blasted with heat before dropping the temp to ~70. Hell often times I will get into my cold truck, wait for heat to kick in, blast it full bore, and once I am not-cold I open the windows to bring the temp back down. Because you want to blast heat at your hands/feet/whatever, but you don’t actually want the ambient temp too warm.
Maybe other times its the exact opposite and I don’t want a blast of hot air, maybe I just got out of the gym and prefer to drive home at 40deg.
You rich mfs keeping your house at 72 damn
When you come home on a hot day and you turn on your home’s AC,
my home isnt a metal box thats 30% glass moving constantly between shade and direct sunlight. it has insulation and i can close the blinds if the sun is getting too hot. auto climate control kinda sucks ass, sure youll get the air down to temp but if the sun comes blasting in and hits me in the chest or face i want to crank it down cold so im comfortable. then when i get behind a tree or building or in a tunnel its too cold so im gonna turn it back up.
That’s exactly why there is a solar sensor that take into account sunload on each side of the car and the system responds accordingly. That little dome on the dash doesn’t just control your headlights at night.
Try a Saab 9-5 feet vent is almost as wide as the one for front window :)
I think mine are aimed okay but the airflow is a bit low. I’ve slightly closed the higher vents as a result which helped.
I have never encountered this issue on a vehicle, so I don’t know what to say. They all had a center console where the floor vents go out the side of the console and into the footwell. They are fixed and don’t adjust, that is true
My Q8 e-tron allows me to set the footwell temperature +4 to -4 of the set temperature of the climate control.
Because
The BMW e30 is the only vehicle I know of where each vent could be adjusted individually. Not just on/off but you could actually balance the flow for each output to however your wanted. It was one of my favorite features of that car. In the winter time, starting cold and as the car warmed up you could gradually redirect the heat to areas where it was needed: start with full defrost, then 50/50 feet heat/defrost, and then once fully warmed up I would dial in just a little bit of the dash vents to keep my hands warm, but not so much as to dry out my eyes, and still have a bit of heat on the feet and defroster to keep the ambient temp even. You get to have it all balanced exactly however is most comfortable. That car also is the oldest one I know of which had heater vents for rear passenger feet, something I wish I had in cold winters as a child.
Out of the 37 car’s I’ve owned my 2017 Camaro and my 1994 Subaru Impreza are the only ones where the feet heat were worth a damn
I miss the old ball cooler.
My 07 bmw can control how much air goes where… really great feature, also has rest button so heat stays on with car off when I run into the store so the car stays warm lol
I’d look at some electric cars, they often have very powerful heaters from the built-in heat pumps, love my 10-year-old Renault Zoe for that reason alone.
Buy an S class and you can do that
One of the bigger reasons I sold my newer subaru and kept an older saab was that the legacy’s vent pointed nowhere near the footwell and it stayed painfully cold by your toes no matter how long the heat was on.
The Saab blows super hot air right at your toes just after about three minutes of driving even when it’s 0f outside.