External temperature delay ...

[sp4rk]

My Leaf, when parked indoors says, for example 70 degrees outside temp.

It's 100 degrees outside the garage.

But it takes the readout at least 15-20 minutes of driving to become accurate.

I also noticed this in my last car.

Anyone else have this problem?

 

[etracing]

It is not really a problem. It is set for a delay so that every time you go in the shade or such it is not jumping
all over the place.

 

[sp4rk]

It is not really a problem. It is set for a delay so that every time you go in the shade or such it is not jumping
all over the place.

There's a huge difference between jumping around and a 20 minute delay. I am not saying it a real problem, just a nuisance.

 

[pjoseph]

Noticed when i washed the car at the DIY carwash. Outside temperature dropped from 97 to 77 degrees.

 

[Weatherman]

Depending on the size and mass of the temperature sensor, its response time to temperature changes may be quite slow. I'm pretty confident that Nissan didn't put a lot of money into installing a high-response-time temperature sensor for measuring outside air temp.

Another thing to consider is that if the sensor gets wet, it may cool off to close to the dewpoint (actually, to the "wet bulb temperature" to be exact, which is a couple of degrees higher than the dewpoint). Once the sensor dries out, it will measure actual air temperature again, after whatever delay is required to warm the sensor up.

 

[DaveinOlyWA]

i had not noticed it other than it seems to read low at times.

 

[dandrewk]

This had been brought up several time before here.

This is my third car with an external temperature display. All have behaved the same way. It's not a defect, nor is it an attempt by the manufacturer to cut costs. It would probably be cheaper to install a "fast acting" thermometer.

The car doesn't measure ambient temperature per se. You don't want it to take a reading from your parked car in the shade, then be flabbergasted a few seconds later when you drive over some baked asphalt and find the outside temperature is 120 degrees. Rather, it samples the air flow -as the car moves-, and even then makes a running average so not to display transient changes (eg, you get behind a bus or a truck). You have to be moving for it to change anything.

I have found the temp display to be quite accurate, and the faster the car is moving, the quicker it gets to the correct temp.

 

[TomT]

Both our BMW and our Acura would update when the car was not moving or was moving slowly...

This is my third car with an external temperature display. All have behaved the same way.

 

[smkettner]

Sure it is slow but 20 minutes is hard to believe.

 

[EricBayArea]

For the record, my LEAF is the exact same way and it annoys me.

For contrast, my Subaru updates within a few minutes.