Modern Climate Control

T_Raymond gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Not really.

Thermostatic temp setting - starting to get common in the early '80s. Side-to-side split - Far from unusual by the mid '90s. Auto fan - again, quite common. But manual, not auto air direction? It's really only thermostatic aircon, not full climate.

It's perfectly respectable but nothing special, by late '80s/early '90s standards. By the mid '90s, it was a long way from cutting edge.

P'raps not. But there's plenty of more advanced, and has been for ages.

I reckon he's referring to stuff like the sun sensor and the velocity sensor being tied into the climate control, so e.g. if the car is sat with the sun beating down on it, it applied a bit of extra cooling. I dunno if the Vectra had that. I can't see the point in the velocity sensor, you're cooling the air in the moving car, are you not?

It says on the website that the point was to cool the car to the desired temperature as quickly as possible and keep it there. The Vectra did that, I've no complaints about the speed of cooling from the climate control it had, not maintaining that level. It didn't heat up very quickly though.

Not as advanced as the system in my Alfa 156, which has fully automated vent control - as did my B5 Passat.

My B6 had a similar system to the Scorpio, VW call it 'Climatic' (as opposed to the fully auto Climatronic as fitted to higher spec/ cars) and my current company hack has a similar system to Climatic.

like

I don't know about the velocity sensor by my Octavia and the Bravo both = had/have sun sensors on the dash that will affect how much cooling is = used. It was possible to demonstrate this quite easily by covering and = uncovering it with a thermometer in the air vents

--=20 Alex

"I laugh in the face of danger , then I hide until it goes away"

Problem with the Scorpio system is normally the stepper motors c*ck up. They're notorious on the Alfa 164 for the same thing (except in the Alfa it's a days work to change some of them).

Actually, the 164 Lusso had full climate in '87.

My Volvo has full climate with all kinds of sensors, full distribution control, fan control, dual zone etc. Works too.

Funnily enough it is the one really unreliable part of a Saab 9000 too, the fan controller, the stepper motor temperature control and the stepper motor vent operation. I had the fan controller fail terminally and the temp controller be an intermittent fault.

had/have sun sensors on the dash that will affect how much cooling is used.

with a thermometer in the air vents

The Celsior had one sun sensor for the automatic lights, but the IS has

I guess it'll depend, though. All climate control systems where the air conditioning have cooled the interior quickly. Some have just been quieter than others! :-) The 9-3 will get suitably noisy if you fire it up after it's been sitting in the sun, but it quietens down much quicker than my previous Saab. You can also change how this one behaves using the profiler.

Also, the 9-3's velocity sensor prompts the system to increase the fan speed if the car is moving slowly and the effect is that the car anticipates an increase in temperature, rather than reads an increase in temperature. Of course, it doesn't do any anticipation at all, it's just designed to do it - but it does it very well.

Indeedy, the Sports Saloon system does some other strange things - it deliberately cycles warmer and cooler air, which gives the impression that it's fresher in the interior and to keep people alert. There's the directional sunshine bias, the night time bias (warmer feet, cooler head), humid air bias (more for the windscreen - especially obvious when you go through a rain shower in the summer or in fog). It doesn't have the by-seat humidity sensors, auxiliary heater (reserved for the diesels in the Saab range), heated seats (I have too pikey a spec'd model) nor does it automatically switch on recirculation as the last BMW 5-Series I drove did, though. :-(

It sounds exactly like the climate control fitted to the XJ40 at the same time. That wouldn't surprise me, quite a few Ford components on XJ40s even before Ford bought the company.