How Hot Can The Sun Make Your Car or Truck Can It Cook

Oh, my God, it's hot in here. Oh, come on AC. Holy cow. Thanks, Matt.

I bet you it's probably hot enough in this thing to fry an egg. I don't know if I should do it in this car. Let's do it in Andy's Jeep. Hey friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So, it's super hot out here right now. I went ahead and tried to get inside of one of my vehicles and I come to find out that it's a million degrees inside there. Now, this has happened to me a million times. And of course, if you have a black vehicle like this one right here with a black interior, which of course looks amazing, the sun's gonna be beaming down, and it's gonna absorb all that energy and transfer it into heat. Let's go ahead and take a little reading of what's going on with this car right here. Just at the paint, I've got 165 degrees. Let's go to the dash.

Looking at approximately 124 in there right now, that's not really super bad. But of course, if I was sitting there for a long period of time, with all the windows up, it's gonna get hot, and I might even potentially get sick. Oh, yeah. If anything, it would be an improvement. Gonna get this pan hot first. I'll leave that up there for a little bit. So, something to think about is if the temperature is just 90 to approximately 105, which if you asked me is pretty hot, you might potentially get a little bit sick, you might start feeling a little bit dizzy, and even a little bit of nausea. But as the temperature starts to climb over that 105 mark, you could potentially get sick, or even worse, possibly even pass out or even, well, die.

Now, unfortunately, not all of us are gonna have a garage that we're able to go ahead and park the car inside of. Inside here it's a controlled climate. So, I can just go ahead and check this. Let's take a peek at what we've got. I've got about 86.9 degrees right on this right here. It's kind of hot, because it isn't really super cool inside this garage right now. Let's go ahead and check the dash. I'm looking at approximately 83 coming through the windshield. Is it accurate? I'd say it's probably pretty close. If I was to park this outside, you can imagine what the temperature is gonna be. Now let's park this thing outside and see just how hot it can get.

This is gonna be bad. Let's see where it's at right now, 114 top of the dash right here, 117, okay. So, turn it off, put up all the windows. Oh, yeah. Let's check the temperature on this thing now. Might be hot enough to fry some bacon. Oh, man. Matt, you don't look so good, bud. But it's only been like five minutes. It's hot in here. Let's start this up. I'm gonna try something to cool it down real quick for you, bud. Put down this window on the back right. Now I'm just gonna take this. And this is gonna circulate all that hot air out of there for you, pal. So what am I doing right here? I went ahead and I opened up the right rear window. The reason for that is because I wanna take the driver's side door. The other one that's farthest away diagonal from the car, and I'm gonna start using it like a fan. What this is gonna do, is it's gonna circulate all the hot, stagnant air that's been sitting inside of this car while I was inside the store for only five minutes. It was sitting in the sun. It's a black car with black interior. Poor Matt isn't doing too good. And I need to help save him.

Another thing that you can do is just go ahead and open up all four of the car doors, and just essentially let the air that's circulating around circulate through the air. And that's gonna go ahead and push out all that hot, stagnant air. Once again, just by having the air that's sitting in there, it's gonna keep building up. And of course, it's gonna start feeling a little stifling inside there. I don't wanna go ahead and get inside this car. Well, it's over 100 degrees. But maybe you don't wanna have all of your car doors open like this, because of course, maybe you're not inside the nicest neighborhood or even an area that you can have the doors open such as maybe a parking lot of some sort. But, if you didn't wanna have all the doors open, what you could do is very safely get inside your car, we're gonna put the key in the on position and we're gonna put all the windows down. Now at this point, what I would do is I would just go ahead and start it up. With having the windows down, it's gonna let the air start to circulate a little bit and it's not as stifling for me.

Now the next thing that I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna go ahead and take the air conditioning. I'm gonna crank it right up here. I wanna make sure that the air conditioning is on. I wanna make sure it's on recycle. And I also wanna make sure that it's on vents. The next thing I'm gonna do is just take all my vents, I'm gonna aim them up. The reason why I wanna aim them up is because all the heat is rising up. So, by creating cold air going up like this, the cold air is gonna circulate around. As it comes around the car, it's gonna start pushing that hot air up and out the windows. So, now that it feels like it's starting to blow cold, I'm just gonna go ahead and crank it right up. It's hot in here. Something else I wanna mention is while you're running your air conditioning sitting still, it's gonna blow kind of cold but once you start revving it or even driving down the road, you're probably gonna notice it gets a little colder overall.

Now in case you're wondering how come I'm not wearing a seatbelt while I'm sitting in the driver's seat with the car running, it's because I'm not actually gonna be driving anywhere. Let's just get that out of the way right now. But the reason why I am sitting in here with it running and the air conditioning on is because it's hot outside, and I got something else to say about why we're in here with the air conditioning. I came in, I went ahead and I put this recirculating button on, the reason why that is, is it's gonna start recirculating the air that's inside of this passenger compartment. Once it's cooled down to the point that it's cooler than the outside temperature, it's essentially gonna keep drawing in that cooler air, cooling it even more, and then bringing it around and around and around just like that. It's gonna take cooler air, make a colder, circulate it, take that cooler air, and make it colder again. If I just have regular air conditioning on or even have the windows open, it's gonna be drawing and kind of warm air. It's gonna try to cool it a little bit, but it's not gonna be as cold overall.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. Don't use your gloves. Oh, smell good in Andy's Jeep. You're welcome. Oh, yeah. So now we need to talk about surface temperatures of your vehicle specifically, while it's sitting out in the sun. Ouch. If you have a dark car like this one right here, it's gonna be especially hot. The door handle on this one, when I went ahead and reached for it, it was super hot, it burnt my hand, even through the gloves. No, it's not like a first-degree burn or third-degree burn or whatever the worst one is, but it definitely hurt a lot. And we should talk about quick ways that you can cool things down. Now if you burn your hand while you're trying to touch something, you can just quickly grab onto a bottle of water like this. And overall, the water is gonna help cool it down assuming it's at a lower temperature than the surface that you're actually touching. And why is that? Because water is a great conductor of heat. Essentially, it's gonna try to draw the heat away from my hand and absorb it. If you wanted to, and you had a water bottle with a nice rag, just go ahead and spray it down, you should be able to cool it fairly quickly. And then you can grab onto this safely. It locked itself. Great.

So then, of course, you'd wanna get inside of your car. And there's gonna be a whole bunch of things inside here that you're gonna be touching while you're trying to drive that are gonna be very hot from sitting in the sun. We have, of course, our steering wheel right here. This is scorching hot. Let's see if I can get a little reading from this. Looks like it's at approximately 128 degrees. Is this something that's gonna melt my skin? No, but it is very uncomfortable. I've got my armrest over here, also super uncomfortable to put my arm on. And then, of course, a lot of people are gonna have a shifter of some sort either in the center or up on here. And that can get hot as well. All these things, if you're careful enough, obviously, you don't wanna go ahead and pour water directly onto it. But if you just use the wet rag, like what I showed you earlier, and just softly brush it over everything, it's gonna cool it down fairly quickly for you. And you should be able to hold on to everything the way that you need to comfortably. A quick tip for when you park your car, just go ahead and take the steering wheel and turn it upside down like this, that way there if it's sitting out in the sun, the bottom area is gonna get hot, but not necessarily the top area where you're gonna be keeping your hands overall.

There we go. We need to cool things off in here a little bit. Just gonna wipe this down. Now, obviously, the longer you can leave the water on here, the cooler it's gonna be. And you probably don't necessarily need me to show you how to cool down every single thing in here. Essentially, just the same thing, carefully wet down a napkin, make sure you don't get it on any of your electronics. And then just carefully hold it on everything that seems like it's too hot for you to go ahead and touch. After a little while, everything should be able to cool down because like I said, water is gonna conduct that heat and try to absorb it for you.

The next thing that we're gonna talk about is seats. Of course, if you have black leather seats like this one right here, this one's actually kind of like a closet. It has cloth and it has leather, but either way, if it's sitting out in the direct sun, it's gonna get very hot, especially if you're wearing shorts or a skirt depending on what you're into. So, all I would do is if you have a nice cloth or maybe a towel of some sort, you can just go ahead and put it right down on here. And that way, it gives you a little bit of a buffer between your skin and the seat itself.

All right, let's see what we got here. Oh, yeah, that's looking good. I don't even need to turn it over that's fine. Hope you're hungry. Oh yeah, this is looking good. Maybe I shouldn't do this on the interior. I don't think anybody's gonna mind. Okay. One last thing before I let you go. Of course, there's a couple of things you can do to your windows to help prevent UV rays from making their way inside. And of course, heating everything up. There are specialized window tints that you can get that's gonna potentially keep out those UV rays, and prevent everything from absorbing that energy and transferring it into heat. If you're a little bit cheap like me, you can just go pretty much anywhere, get one of these windshield shades, and that's gonna help prevent the majority of the sunlight from making its way in there.

Now I wanna go check out my bacon and eggs. Not bad. Okay. It's hot. Okay, friends, I hope you liked the video and I hope you learned a little something. If you did you wanna talk about it. Leave it in the comment section below, because I always love to hear from you. If you liked the video, love the video, or you learned a little something, feel free to share it with all your friends. Smash the like button, and of course subscribe, ring the bell, that way there you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.

Not bad. Hello.