Your car thermometer is wrong. Here's why

#weather #charlotte #northcarolina #southcarolina
This has been one of the hottest first halves of July in Charlotte history peaking at 101 degrees on July 5. But your car's tiny thermometer isn't trustworthy when it comes to gauging temperatures.

When you get in your car and look at the dash, that temperature you see doesn't actually use a thermometer but rather something called a thermistor. The name comes from a combination of the words thermal and resistor. It measures temperature based on electrical current changes as heat is added or removed.

The problem is most car's thermistors are located behind the vehicle's grill, leaving it exposed to heat radiated off of the road's surface and the engine, and that can run around 200 degrees. This makes your car's display temperature about 10 to 20 degrees warmer when you get in your car after it’s been sitting on a hot summer day.

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[Sva_rog]

Proof you dont need to be right, just confidently wrong

[Lukemarlowe]

Gotta make the news guy feel useful somehow

[maxturgidson]

I think everybody knows that when they’re sitting in the Sun, not moving that their thermometer wrong. you can see it go down to the advertised temperature when you’re moving maybe a little bit more but you’re on concrete. It’s the real temperature of where you are. There’s a lot of algorithms and stuff that go into this. They don’t just throw it on there like Samsung refrigerator.

[mrslowly]

Ive never seen an air temp sensor in the front grill... Theyre usually away from heat sources like in wing mirrors.