One of those cat hair / aerodynamics questions.
I washed my car with my new pressure washer toy the other day, and it blasted so much dirt out of the paintwork that it left the surface very low-friction. Schrodinger cat can’t resist sitting on a clean car, and I found him lounging about on the bonnet (hood) just asking to be tickled, which I did, causing him to slowly slide down the slope as he writhed happily. Leaving behind a shedload of cat hair as he went.
No problem, thought I, it’ll blow off when I drive away. Which I did a little later, a round trip of 250 miles (400km) to central London and back, cruising for about 3 hours at up to 100mph (160kph), and then lots of stop-starting when I hit London, so a constant cycling of speeds from 0 to 30mph (48kph). To my surprise, my car was still hairy when I stopped in London, and hairy still when I checked again upon my return home. The hairs weren’t stuck down with goo or static, and each and every one of them could be easily and demonstrably shifted by a gentle puff of air courtesy of my lungs. They were all, however, laid dead flat to the car surface. None had any gap between hair and car.
The question is: What bizarre effect causes easily dislodgable cat hairs to stick to my car for hours of driving at all sorts of speeds? I know there’s some low-pressure effects with car aerodynamics (which is why my rear windscreen never sees any raindrops above 20mph), but I’m damned if I can explain this. For the record, it’s Autumn (Fall) here, and at the time the air was about 10 to 15 degrees Celcius, not wet but with the usual Autumn relative humidity of 100%.