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AC Blowing super cold on Auto

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kbecks13

Active Member
Dec 27, 2017
1,989
2,454
SoCal
So for the last 3 days, my car has been acting very strange and has never done this before over the last 2.5 years. I keep the HVAC set to 70F and auto pretty much all the time, but for the last few mornings the car seems to BLAST the AC on super cold and fan speed 7 for the first 5-10 minutes of driving.

It's quite odd because the outside temp is about 65F and it was cool all night, so obviously the car isn't warm at all and is definitely at or below 70F - yet the HVAC still blows super cold.

Not sure if this is a hardware problem with my specific car or perhaps a software bug, curious if anyone else has noticed something similar?

TL;DR - Car is very cold on auto, doesn't seem right. Anyone else see this recently?
 
If you didn't live in SoCal I'd guess something to do with humidity. A change in your garage environment or a change in the software.

Yet I live near the Gulf Coast, with humidity in spades, and haven't seen this?

I have on rare occasion seen some slight oddities that seem related to my wife having 70F on her profile and me always on LO (in manual mode). But that you didn't mention anything like, and the high repeatability, it probably doesn't apply here?
 
Just in case, did you recently put anything in that might be generating heat? Small battery pack? USB hub? Raspberry Pi? OBD-II dongle? Stray reflection? Even a little bit of heat dissipation could cause a nearby sensor to detect a number of degrees warmer.

It seems like there are a few temperature sensors in the interior, perhaps one is being thrown off my something warm near it.
 
My HVAC acted weird in the first drive I used it since getting the 2020.16 update. I set it to auto and 65, and it ramped up to 9 speed, fine. Then it would just randomly turn off for about 1-2 seconds, then immedaitely go back to 9 for some period of 5-60 seconds, then turn off 1-2 seconds and then go back up, etc. Happened my entire 7-8 minute drive to work this morning.
 
My HVAC acted weird in the first drive I used it since getting the 2020.16 update. I set it to auto and 65, and it ramped up to 9 speed, fine. Then it would just randomly turn off for about 1-2 seconds, then immedaitely go back to 9 for some period of 5-60 seconds, then turn off 1-2 seconds and then go back up, etc. Happened my entire 7-8 minute drive to work this morning.
I just received the 2020.16 update yesterday and have not seen this issue, yet. However, from what I have ready on this forum, resetting the MCU is sometimes needed after an update to get things to settle into place.
 
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Damn that's cold! Sounds like an overly cold restaurant or hospital. :eek:

Honestly, the problem is that I don't have a way to tell the car "ALWAYS RUN THE F'ING FAN AT MINIMUM OF 4" while otherwise doing everything else on auto. Oftentimes the ambient external air temperature is actually comfortable for me but if I set the temperature to that, it just gets stale and gross inside the car because it drops the fan speed too low. So I just set the temperature lower to make it run the AC and fan.
 
Honestly, the problem is that I don't have a way to tell the car "ALWAYS RUN THE F'ING FAN AT MINIMUM OF 4" while otherwise doing everything else on auto. Oftentimes the ambient external air temperature is actually comfortable for me but if I set the temperature to that, it just gets stale and gross inside the car because it drops the fan speed too low. So I just set the temperature lower to make it run the AC and fan.
Stale air may be due to RECIRC being on. I find it to be activated more times than not and just turn it off.
 
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