Tinted windows help a great deal with slowing down the heating of a vehicle’s interior, IMHO.
Dead horse fully beaten… IMHO.
Well, not quite.
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The best car AC can only give you about a 40 degree F drop.
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On a hot day, your car in the sun will be 140 degrees or more.
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Your AC will then blow 100 degree air in your face.
Open all the doors and windows for a few minutes to let the (relatively) cooler air replace the 140 degree air. If you can reach the ignition and the AC without getting in, start it up, but don’t get in right away.
Do not turn it on “recirculate” right away. The air in your car is still hotter than the outside air. If it’s 90 degrees out, your AC will chill it to 50 degrees. The air in your car, even after opening it up, will be 110 degrees or more. The AC will chill it to 70 degrees on recirculate.
In most cars, turning the temp knob all the way to blue will automatically turn on “recirculate.” You can hear it change as you turn it down.
It’s gonna be a closed casket for the horse’s family.
But can horse #23 beat horse #17, or is it already too late?
The way I do it (in muggy Illinois) is to open my car door, sit down and turn on the air on 3 (out of 4 levels), leave the door open until I can feel the air is starting to get cool, then shut it and crack my driver’s window to push out the rest of the hot air as I drive. Works pretty well. Before I know it I have to turn it down to 2 because I’m too cold!
I do not recirculate the air.
To add another piece of information to the mix:
More modern cars are equipped with smarter systems, which don’t start the fans until they’ve reached the temperature specified by the user (when placed on auto setting, that is). This happens with both warm and cold settings, and reduces the time necessary to maintain a certain temperature.
As to theory A, while you can get air moving with the fans on, you’d get the same effect by just opening the windows, and driving. Any air coming through the vents, is the same from outside.
Neither is going to have much more of an effect on gas mileage, than the other. B is the better way to go, because as stated above, you’re not really going to evacuate a substantial amount of warm air (in the sense, that you won’t noticeably affect gas mileage). Just turn on the AC, and let it do its thing.