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I bought a used electric car. I just put my foot down and it goes … Well, it doesn’t go voom, it just goes. Might squeel the tires a little, but otherwise silent power.
o7 CMDR
“pass”? Is that American English for overtake?
Didn’t realize that term wasn’t used in British English.
Yes, and it is said in Canada as well
usually we hang our balls out the window as we overtake, which makes it a pass.
Or when we’re being family-friendly, we just press or hang a “full moon”. We’re not savages, after all.
It’s a sign of trust
They’re only allowed to pass backwards and kick forwards though.
This would be how I feel driving my Miata if my Miata came with AC. I just don’t attempt to pass.
I had a mk1 mx5 (actually a JDM import eunos) and it was a 1.8L variant and it absolutely could overtake things effectively with the AC on. It was a manual and I absolutely thrashed it. Big grins.
…my ND automatically disengages the compressor under heavy throttle; i’m convinced that my elise compressor is just cosplay…
My brother’s first car was a 1989 Dodge Colt. He couldn’t run heat, wipers, and headlights at the same time. So driving at night, in the winter, when it was raining, became this dance of running the wipers until your ass was almost frozen to the seat, then turning them off and running the heat until you were almost blind, then repeat.
My first brand-new car was a '90 Nissan Sentra, back when Sentras were the absolute bottom of Nissan’s product line. It had AC but the car basically couldn’t accelerate with it on unless I was going downhill. Unfortunately I lived in Florida (no hills) so I drove around with no AC. In Florida. This was bad enough but also the windows were hand-cranked so I just left them down all the time. That car was a soggy mess and I kept getting shit stolen.
I would guess that would have had vacuum powered wipers. And the heat comes from the engine - was the blower motor really struggling that bad with the headlights on? I don’t mean to sound skeptical, but this is really surprising to me!
Vacuum wipers in 1989? 59 maybe. Sounds like the alternator output was too weak to keep up with the electrical demand of headlights, blower, and wipers.
I would also like to autopsy this car.
I have no idea. He was also like, the third owner, so it’s quite possible that things were failing.
Ice vehicles automatically turn off the AC at wide open throttle.
Some do if the belt drives the compressor. Humans have built many cars, exceptions exist
Belts drive the clutch. I haven’t seen a single production car that has a direct driven compressor.
My family had two volvos that behaved like this. One was an '81 Volvo 240 DL manual, and the other was a '92 Volvo 740 automatic. Both of them could get up to highway speed noticeably faster if you turned off the A/C. (My dad used to say they’d “do 0 to 60 on a leisurely afternoon.”) There’s some chance that A/C was aftermarket on the '81, so maybe that’s a factor? But the '92 did it too, and that was definitely stock.
I can believe it, i was talking about cars made this century. The care from the 1900’s were something else.
Im thinking of something where an electric motor does it so probably a hybrid… Maybe a Lexus
Then turning it off doesn’t give you more power in those cases, and even those ones will limit the kw output to the electric AC during wide open watts if the battery can’t supply the output. But most evs don’t need to turn off the ac because the battery output exceeds the electric motor requirements
+1 for hybrids lol
I used to drive a lot of 4-bangers and remember having to do that with pretty much every one of them either to overtake another vehicle or even sometimes driving up a steep hill lol. The air conditioning just sucked so much power from those little engines.
Been driving a hybrid for 6 or 7 years now, which also has a little 4-cylinder engine, but the electric motor more than makes up for that. It’s got a dash display showing the electric motor/ICE power split, and when you punch the gas, you can see the electric motor doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Love it.
Every time my wife comes back from a work trip she complains that the rental ICE car felt like driving with the parking brake on compared to our little budget EV
The AC compressor shuts off when your engine exceeds ~4k rpm on most cars anyways. It can only spin so fast without causing problems. And if you’re trying to pass you’re probably exceeding 4k (on a gas engine) and the car is smart enough to figure it out.
A lot of newer cars don’t have the clutch anymore, they instead use a pressure valve to reduce pressure on the compressor. Should have the same effect though
But it gives you a fraction of an edge on the beginning before you hit 4k in that scenario. So you have a faster start.
2005 1.0 Opel Corsa on a hot summer day ahh feeling. Brings back memories
ASS
Yes, don’t idle in the sun without running the blower full tilt on warm with the windows down or risk your motor overheating.
2003 1.2 Vauxhall Corsa (which I still own!), yeah had to hit that boost button, god it was slow with aircon on.
