I don’t understand the appeal. I don’t particularly want to look up at the sky and opening it does not seem to offer any benefits over a normal window. It adds to cost and reduces rigidity and handling. So why are they so popular? What am I missing?
There are times, on a warm summer night, where it’s nice. But otherwise, you’re not missing anything. It’s a status symbol more than anything.
I think the ubiquity of cars with a sunroof makes them much less of a status symbol than they maybe once were. Some people like the feeling of open air and natural light in the car. I’ve had several cars with a sunroof and I enjoyed them. I don’t think a sunroof would ever be a dealbreaker in a car purchase, but having one is a nice feature. Now I drive a Jeep Wrangler and it’s kind of a pain to take the hardtop off, but it has “freedom panels” over the front seats that are easily removed and I enjoy that too.
I love a sunroof. Convertibles are way too much air for me, but the sunroof is perfect. I get to feel the sun on my face during the commute - when otherwise I might go house-car-office and back without ever having any time outside. Many a Winter afternoon I’ve been driving around with the heat blasting and the sunroof wide open.
It’s also fantastic in the summertime when the car has been heating up to Venusian levels in a parking lot. Open the sunroof, crack a back window, turn on the A/C, and the heat just rises out in a flash.
If you’re on a long drive and somebody had a bean burrito for breakfast, it’s a lifesaver.
I’m a fresh air freak in all circumstances. So it’s just an absolute dream for me.
My sunroof is closed 99+ percent of the time. Last thing I want is a load of bird excrement finding its way into my vehicle.
mmm
I use the ‘tilt’ part of the sunroof a lot. Not sure if there’s a name for it. I never open the whole roof. Don’t like the noise.
This reminded me of a guy I worked with a long time ago. He bought a brand new Hyundai Pony. Like I said, a long time ago.The guy was a blowhard. Always boasting when he had nothing to boast of.
For those who don’t know, the Pony was Hyundai’s entry into the North American market. It was cheap and they sold a ton of them. It was also a very basic car.
Anyway, he buys this brand new Pony. Then he pays to have the bench seats removed and replaced with bucket seats (is bucket seats still a term).
Then, speaking of sunroofs, he paid some body shop to cut a hole in the roof to install a sunroof. He was forever returning it because the sunroof leaked. He still found a way to brag about this souped up piece of garbage.
One day when he had once again dropped off his car to try to have the sunroof repaired (it was ongoing), without thinking I made the crack that for what he’d spent attempting to mold the Pony into the car of his dreams, he could have bought something decent. He didn’t speak to me for about 2 weeks.
I like it. But I like it about 1% of the time. Most of the time I don’t even remember I have it.
It does come in handy when the car interior is really hot due to sitting in the sun. I crank up the AC and open the roof and the windows to get the superheated air out quickly.
Never liked them. My present vehicle came with it, but not because I wanted it. I think I’ve opened it twice in ten years just to see if it still works.
I just bought a new vehicle, and for the first time, I’ve got a sunroof. It’s a smaller truck, with all power windows, including the sunroof and the window into the bed of the truck.
We’ve had mostly nice weather around here, so I’ve been bombing along the local roads with everything open, and I’m loving it. I said the other day, with everything open, it’s almost a convertible.
Of course, I’ve always liked driving around with all my windows down when I can. I prefer that over AC, unless the day is really, stupidly, hot. So this new truck is a dream for me.
And as others have said, it’s great for letting the heat out when the truck has been sitting in the sun. I can open 5 of 6 windows with my remote as I approach the truck, and it’s great.
Our second car has one, and it’s a pain to unplug the drain when it gets clogged and causes the car to be filled with water. We made sure our newest car didn’t have one.
I love my sunroof (actually a moonroof with clear glass and a shade). I usually open the shade and leave the moonroof shut. I like the extra natural light. Vehicles without this feature feel claustrophobic to me.
(And after my time on submarines, I need all the natural light I can get.)
I have almost exclusively purchased convertibles throughout my car ownership career, but in those times when I haven’t had a soft top, I’ve made sure to have a sunroof. I just love the open air experience. Really, I’m a motorcyclist at heart, and a car is kind of my second choice anyway.
Same here. I’ve had a couple of vehicles with a sunroof, but always because the car I was buying happened to have one. If my current sunroof went dead the day I drove off the lot two years ago, I wouldn’t even know it.
I’m reminded of another thread that talks about things that were ubiquitous in your lifetime but are now gone. For a couple decades (maybe 1970 - 1990), aftermarket sunroofs were pretty popular. I remember lots of ads for them, including shots of the techs cutting through the roof and lovingly lowering the sunroof into place. Haven’t seen one in a while.
(I knew one or two people who got sunroofs installed and they griped constantly about leakage.)
I have one in my 2010 Lexus ES 350.
Never use it.
My 2023 Camry came with it. I was like whatever, then I started opening it. On nice days, few and far between in no. Illinois, it’s lovely to have fresh air. I always have the cover “rolled back” for light.
My car has one. I don’t really like it, but the only benefits are the fact taht I’m tall, and it gives me some extra headroom. However I’ve heard cars w/o sunroofs have more headspace anyway, so thats probably not a benefit.
on hot summer days when the interior of the car is extremely hot, I find if I turn the car on, open the sunroof and leave the drivers side door open while running the AC, it helps push a lot of the hot air out of the car through the sunroof. So that is a useful feature.
But I virtually never use it other than helping to cool down the car interior that way. Plus I have a remote starter, so its not even that useful for that since I can just run the car for 15 minutes before getting in.
What Loach and TruCelt wrote above about getting the hot air out of a long-parked car during Gulf Coast summers … that’s the biggest plus of a sunroof down here.
Additionally, our car doesn’t have working A/C but it does have a sunroof. Yes, the open sunroof is louder than I’d like (esp at highway speeds), but the sunroof open plus one or both front windows open maybe halfway makes a drive in 90+F heat much more comfortable. Not as good as working climate control, but well tolerable.
Yeah, that sounds like a terrible idea.
(Right up there with a co-worker of mine who bought a brand-new Toyota Sequoia without the leather seats he wanted, so he paid the dealer to remove the factory-installed original seat covers and install leather seats. To my eye he wasted a lot of money for a substandard installation that never looked right.)
In the mountains/altitude of Colorado, we can have winter days with picture-perfect clear blue skies and single digit temps.
On days like that, it’s rather glorious to drive with the sunroof all the way open.
Other than that, I generally use it – either the flip-up part or the slide-back function – to get heat out of the car before I drive away.