I don't love the way Volvo does their parking climate either.

If you just set the main climate control to whatever you want, in your case Max AC, and get out of the car, it will turn off.

When on the climate screen, you have to click over to "Parking" and activate it there.

I also think that if the car isn't plugged in, it will only run for 3 minutes. At least when I activate climate preconditioning from the app, it only runs for 3 minutes.

That time gets extended to 30 min if the car is plugged in.

If someone knows different please chime in.

 

Very interesting. So it might it have to be started several times and the climate may need to adjusted seasonally. Preconditioning for warm seem to work well and I am wondering if that temp conflicts with summer.

 

Luckycharms mostly got it. Starting HVAC using the app is totally independent of what settings you left the car with. You can't adjust the temperature that it cools or warms to for preconditioning. It shoots for about 72F.

The app is a little confusing for PHEVs, but if you want it run longer before you get to the car (unplugged), I recommend using "remote start" option instead of "climate".

For PHEVs...

CLIMATE:
-plugged in will run for 30-50 minutes
-unplugged it will run for 3 minutes to cool, and I'm not sure about heating, don't remember, I want to say around 10 minutes.

REMOTE START:
-plugged in N/A
-unplugged you can run it up to 15 minutes. It will use battery power, and if that runs out, will start the ICE.

 

Yeah, they just go for 72 no matter how they're left, which makes sense especially in the spring and fall when it might be different morning to night. But also, max is really not using the system right either. Just set the temp you want and set a fan speed you want. Getting in a car and seeing it set to lo signals bad things to me. It drives me nuts when our clean up folks do it... the air coming out the vents isn't any colder when it's set to low. It's just a matter of when it would trigger to slow the fan speed down, and very few people want it to actually blow as hard as it can for the entire trip.

 

One thing i've noticed is that when i set the temperature to "auto" it doesn't seem to adjust the fan speed accordingly until the temperature is reached? It seems like I have to manually tap on the fan speed right now.

 

Thanks! I wasn't aware of that.

Is that the reason it doesn't blow max air right away in the heat of summer? Ie waits until the A/C compressor gets up to speed or something?

 

I get so confused why folks get confused by it. Think of it like the rain sensing wipers... they're automatic, but you can also select the level of sensitivity YOU like. The fan speed you select in automatic is not the fan speed it will always blow, but rather the highest level it will blow.

So here's what it sounds like is happening:

95 degrees, you get in, set the car to 62 and fan speed max.... [this is wrong... set the temp to the temp you want to maintain, and if you want max fan all the time, okay.]

As it starts to get cold in the car [because you set it to 62] you set the fan to 1 [this is wrong too... if you had left auto on with a normal fan speed it would have automatically slowed down... but because you set the temp so low it ended up staying at a high fan level below the temp you would have been comfortable at]

Then you say Volvo is poorly designed, when this is one of the few areas that I don't think it could be programmed any better than it is.

Now it's not just ya'll in this thread. Half the sales staff here can't seem to wrap their head around it easy. And those of us that get it pull our hair out at how well the system works, but yet no one lets it do it's job because everyone feels the needs to manually control it.

 

I agree, and don't understand why people seem to have such a problem with it. In the New Jersey winter, I literally leave it at basically one temp (I think 70), fan on 3, Auto, and I am virtually always comfortable. In the summer, I set it to 70 on most days, fan on 3, and Auto, and again, I am very comfortable. I may put it down to 69 sometimes, may bump the fan speed to 4 sometimes, but these are all negligible inconveniences. There's no real need to go "lo" or "max" or "62" or whatever people seem to do sometimes. YMMV.

 

I do believe 5 is a max setting so it won't go down from there... I never like max so I never run the fan that high. So I'd give you that it's not obvious that 5 will stay on max. I always set it at 3. It speeds up quite nicely and cools fast, but never gets too loud. But literally I go all year when I had a demo and never touch the climate settings other than to change the temp from 68 in summer to 72 in winter.

 

I think i have 5 on mine, and another level for "Max". But yeah, to @Luckycharms783 s point its not evidently clear that the fan goes down. I did find recently that on setting 3/4 it would go down but looonnnggg after I think it should (the car was already quite cool). Anyway, i'll keep monitoring.

 

My last car was a 2022 Subaru Outback Wilderness. When I started the car with the app I could preset what I wanted the HVAC to do. I always set it to Low and Max AC for the summer months. I wanted the cabin to be comfortable for the approximately 10 minutes it was running before I got in it. This was a plus as the Max AC cooled the car down much faster than setting it to 68 at a low fan speed. Just my observation. Kind of sucks that Volvo doesn't allow such control over the system. Oh well.

Don

 

I just have the temperature set to 21.5 degrees Celcius (70.5F) all year round. Have it set to Auto all year round. Most of the year I have the max fan speed set to 2, but during mid summer I sometimes set it to 3 until I am getting annoyed by the amount of cold air.
I can sit in the car all year round wearing a t-shirt. It is a comfortable car.

Getting back to the original question, on my MY2020 ICE S60, I do a remote start to cool down during summer (it runs for 15 minutes) and use the parking heater to warm up the car during winter (when I want to leave within 15 minutes, the car will fire up the engine, if I have more time, the parking heater will take up to 30 minutes without starting the engine).

 

Putting the comments previously in other words: if it is 100F outside, setting the cabin temperature to 72F or 62 or LOW will not make any difference for the first 10-15 minutes.

The sun will still be burning just as bright, trying to heat up the car. And an AC system is not magic. It is limited by science.

Setting the blower speed to MAX will not get the interior temperature down quicker than when it is at 5, 4 or 3. It will just blow out more air. And the higher you set the blower speed, the higher the temperature of the air coming out of the vents will be.

 

I will say that the Auto function in my Volvo overall works way better than in my wife's GMC Terrain. The fan speed will vary itself on Auto to an extent. If it is 80F outside, my car is hot as can be, I usually set the fan to 4, and it will be blasting away. After 5-6 minutes, the fan slowly backs off a bit as the temps in the car come down.

Now I don't feel that the auto fan speed varies enough. It ramps itself down too quickly and I tend to manually crank it back up to 4 or 5 when it is really hot out. But 20 min into the drive, it really does settle down nicely and go into the background keeping things very stable.

As for configuring the remote start temp...I thought I read in the manual somewhere that it defaults to 72F no matter what. Mine is not a hybrid, so options are different.

 

I will say that the Auto function in my Volvo overall works way better than in my wife's GMC Terrain. The fan speed will vary itself on Auto to an extent. If it is 80F outside, my car is hot as can be, I usually set the fan to 4, and it will be blasting away. After 5-6 minutes, the fan slowly backs off a bit as the temps in the car come down.

Now I don't feel that the auto fan speed varies enough. It ramps itself down too quickly and I tend to manually crank it back up to 4 or 5 when it is really hot out. But 20 min into the drive, it really does settle down nicely and go into the background keeping things very stable.

Not saying anyone is right or wrong, but on a 95* day, Auto, 70* temp, and Fan Speed 3 get my car ice cold. There may be a time I want to adjust the temp a bit, or go to FS 4, but for all intents and purposes, Auto, FS 3 and a consistent temperature get me comfortably through cold winters, and hot summers. I've never felt the need to go to FS 5, and usually don't change it from 3.

Nothing annoys me more than getting into a friend's car, and having too hot or too cold air blasting me in my face, as either people don't know how to use their own systems, or those systems stink. Volvos are more elegant for me. YMMV I suppose.

 

Since reading this thread I've been experimenting with the climate/remote start/preconditioning over the past week and I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with Volvo's documentation about their climate preconditioning, as well as the implementation of it.

Turbovagn is pretty much correct in his post.

For PHEVs:

CLIMATE:
-plugged in will run for 30 minutes
-unplugged it will run for 3 minutes to cool, and I'm not sure about heating, don't remember, I want to say around 10 minutes.

REMOTE START:
-plugged in N/A
-unplugged you can run it up to 15 minutes. (but they only allow you to run this twice, for a total of 30 minutes, before you have to start the car) It will use battery power, and if that runs out, will start the ICE.

This is a pretty poor implementation of what should be pretty straight forward.

Why have two different functions that both do the same thing: bring the cabin up to temperature using whatever means necessary?

I think they should just combine both (climate and remote start) into one button and give you a prompt with what will happen when you select it.

Like "This will run your climate on battery power for 15 minutes, would you like to continue on ICE power after battery has been depleted?"
"Would you like to run the battery for as long as possible until it is depleted?"
"Would you like the ICE to come on after the battery has been depleted?"

Or something similar.

 

I was in a car today and when it was on 5 it said max and auto was off. As mentioned, I would never go in 5 normally so I never paid it much attention, but because of the thread it made me think of it. As soon as I selected 3, like a proper human being, auto came back on without any other adjustments made by myself.

 

Mine has been in auto the whole time; 5 or Max (they are different buttons for me) both do not negate auto. Neither seems to come down from that high speed either. Maybe its a V60 Polestar thing?