Rear Passengers Get Vents Too - 2015 Acura TLX SH-AWD Long-Term Road Test

Edmunds.com

Rear Passengers Get Vents Too - 2015 Acura TLX SH-AWD Long-Term Road Test

A luxury car should have rear vents for the rear passengers, yet there are a few that don't. Our 2015 Acura TLX isn't one of them, but there's still some room for improvement.

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nate001

and the vents are closed in the photo talking about how great the vents are.

jakek66

So does a VW Golf (Since MkV)... And I don't know of a single vehicle EVER to offer rear ventilated seats under $40k, or even S100k.

allthingshonda

I maybe telling my age but I grew up in an era where cars were HUGE and none of them had rear seat air conditioning vents. Yet they had no problems cooling the entire cabin with just the 4 vents in the dash. That was also the time when the air conditioning compressor was almost the size of a dinner plate. On summer vacation road trips my Mom's Buick Park Avenue could keep everything ice cold on the lowest fan speed and normal A/C not max. All the vents would have the vapor/fog coming out of them. Why don't they do that any more?

schen72

allthingshonda said:

I maybe telling my age but I grew up in an era where cars were HUGE and none of them had rear seat air conditioning vents. Yet they had no problems cooling the entire cabin with just the 4 vents in the dash. That was also the time when the air conditioning compressor was almost the size of a dinner plate. On summer vacation road trips my Mom's Buick Park Avenue could keep everything ice cold on the lowest fan speed and normal A/C not max. All the vents would have the vapor/fog coming out of them. Why don't they do that any more?

My childhood experience for roadtrips across the western US in our 70s station wagon was that the A/C was not powerful enough and I was always sweltering in the back seat. I, for one, welcome rear vents and ventilated seats!

craigo7

allthingshonda said:

I maybe telling my age but I grew up in an era where cars were HUGE and none of them had rear seat air conditioning vents. Yet they had no problems cooling the entire cabin with just the 4 vents in the dash. That was also the time when the air conditioning compressor was almost the size of a dinner plate. On summer vacation road trips my Mom's Buick Park Avenue could keep everything ice cold on the lowest fan speed and normal A/C not max. All the vents would have the vapor/fog coming out of them. Why don't they do that any more?

I think there's a mix of reasons... newer refrigerants that are more environmentally friendly but behave differently... that big compressor likely lowered mpg's and sapped more power too. And it would've been designed without the benefit of computer airflow modeling so it would've been sized to deal with any situation rather than more elegantly routing air around with design.