I always knew it’s was a reliability risk in buying a German car rather than one made in Japan, even one as beautifully engineered as a 911, from a brand - Porsche - that’s got a great contrarian record of reliability. My one plus year with the GT3 was going quite well free of any hiccups. but the curse of the German car gremlins struck this past weekend while I was taking the car out for a drive to charge the battery, after having sat unmoved for over three weeks (COVID conditioning, I’d call it).
It was a typical cool day in San Francisco, so I didn’t notice it initially; after 15 minutes or so on the drive, I started to feel a bit stuffy and hot, which is abnormal because the car’s automatic climate control is set to 70 degrees fahrenheit at all times. I checked the air vents with my hands and felt a slight breeze coming out, so I dismissed the thought of anything being amiss; perhaps I just happened to catch the sun at a bad angle or something.
It wasn’t until I got further south - and the outside temperature climbed into the upper 80s - did I realize that something was wrong: the cabin was indeed getting hotter and hotter. As a test, I pressed the button for maximum air conditioning, but absolutely no air came out of the vents: the usual loud cyclone of whooshing noises were nowhere to be found. I then turned off the AC, and manually bumped up the fan speed; again, nothing, not a breath of air can be felt from the ventilation system.
I found a highway rest stop to momentarily park the car to see if turning it off and back on (it’s a cliche in the tech support world because it works an amazing amount of time) would do the trick to resolve the problem. Sadly it did not. Faced with rising temperatures with no way to cool down the interior, I resorted to head home and make an appointment at the dealership for the earliest possible date. Hilarious that I was just writing last week about the the negative aspects of owning a car - the time and money you have to spend when things go awry, like a tire puncture, or in my case, a malfunctioning HVAC system.
At least I get to tick this off my list: a German-made car with an unscheduled visit to the dealer service department.
Resetting the battery didn’t do it either.