You know the feeling. You've been out running errands on a hot summer afternoon, and as soon as you open the door of your car, you are hit in the face with a wall of suffocating heat. The steering wheel is hot, the seatbelt buckle could sear a steer, and sitting on a black leather seat is like a punishment. If this sounds familiar, there might be an easy fix you aren’t using, and the research backs it up.
A study, ‘Parked cars get dangerously hot, even on cool days, Stanford study finds,’ published by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, discovered that the temperature inside a parked car can increase by an average of 40 degrees Fahrenheit within an hour, no matter the temperature outside. According to the Stanford study, about 80 percent of that rise occurs in the first 30 minutes, meaning your car heats up to dangerous temperatures much faster than most people think.
