You don't need any of that. You just need a knob that ranges from make as cold as you can to make as hot as you can and a reasonable fine grain in between. I can find the right set point because I'm literally sat next to the knob and I'm a better control system than anything they can come up with.
My (old, obsolete) car's knobs not only stop completely at the extremes, but they aren't truly continuous but have "stops" every half degree that you can feel in your hand while turning them without looking at them at all.
That's too ... physical ... for modern designs, I guess?
And I'm a lazy fucker: I want to set a temperature range and then not bother until I sell the car. Under the range? Heat it. Over? Freeze it. But a range, not a single point. So if the temperature is between min and max, the AC stays off.
I posit you're unusual in your opinion. I mostly observe people use the climate control knob like a heater knob. If it's cold, the set temperature gets cranked up; if hot it gets cranked down.
I don't like thermal shocks when getting in/out of the car so I stick it to a low-ish temperature in winter and something high-ish but still bearable in summer.
I really don't like getting out of a car cooled to 18 C when outside it's 30+.
However this just proves "smart" automatic a/c is useless because, newsflash, different people have different habits.
> I mostly observe people use the climate control knob like a heater knob.
That's because their car has badly designed and implemented climate control.
I do that in my current car because it has crap climate control, Tesla S 70D. In my previous car I set it when I bought the car and adjusted it perhaps once a year, Rover 75 Connoisseur.
Yeah, that's because climate control is crap. When I get into the car and it's 45° I want to a) get some hot air on my feet and hands, and b) warm the cabin up to a comfortable temperature ASAP. The standard climate control system doesn't do that, it sets the air temperature to roughly the target temperature and takes twenty minutes to get to something comfortable. I can "trick" it by setting the target temp to 95°, and then I'll actually get warm air.
I get that approach for AC, because cooling air takes energy, but there's no excuse for that behavior when (in an ICE car) you're warming the cabin with waste heat from the engine. Just give me some damn heat!
Fortunately, I have an old enough car that I can take manual control of the heater and blast it for a few minutes until I'm warm, and then switch over to climate control to maintain temp. Cars which don't have manual override have to be tricked by using the climate control like a heater knob. It's dumb, all around.
Do you wear the same amount of clothing all year around? Never excerted yourself or been in a blizzard before entering your car where you might want to get back to your ideal body temperature quickly?
