![]() With all these headwinds, it is little wonder that no major auto manufacturer was in a rush to get back into the A/C business immediately following the war. Dealerships would have been loathe to add specialized equipment and new classes of union labor to meet these needs, especially to support only a small handful of cars. Moreover, it was heavily unionized, like many trades in the day. Air conditioning and refrigeration at the time (and still is) was a highly specialized trade, requiring bespoke training and equipment. One final reason had nothing to do with technology. Yet such a system would also have to be simple and safe enough for the grease monkeys in the dealer’s service department to work on. From this experience, they knew that any automotive system would likely be temperamental, and the associated warranty costs would be astronomical until the kinks got worked out. While this theoretically gave them expertise to draw upon (which would help down the road), it also gave them enough information to know that A/C systems are highly complex and potentially dangerous, and require constant maintenance by highly skilled technicians using specialized tools. Thus, air conditioning was viewed as an option with limited regional appeal.įurthermore, many automakers already had separate refrigeration divisions (such as Frigidaire in the case of GM, or Kelvinator at Nash). Most were in Detroit, but even the independents outside of Detroit were in moderate climates (Studebaker in South Bend, Indiana, and Nash in Kenosha, Wisconsin). Barclay, there were three major reasons for this factory A/C gap (in addition to the reasons listed above).įirst, every major car manufacturer was located in a northern climate, where summers were short and relatively mild. Rod Barclay covers this period of automotive A/C history very well in his seminal book Boy! That Air Feels Good!According to Mr. As a result, the next car with factory air wouldn’t come out of Detroit until 1953, well over a decade after Bishop and Babcock installed their last system. ![]() Besides, Detroit was selling every car they could make to meet the pent-up post-war demand, so they didn’t really need a gimmick like A/C to sell more cars. The B&B A/C system was effectively obsolete, and engineering resources were too scarce to apply to a limited luxury item like air conditioning. Unfortunately, World War II intervened, which prevented any further refinements on the B&B system, as well as precluding any automaker from developing their A/C system.Īfter the war ended, the major manufacturers were concentrating all their effort on resuming production and developing their first post-war cars. Well, more like cautiously stuck their toes in the water, as they all used the same third-party Bishop and Babcock A/C system (as opposed to designing their own systems in-house).Īs these systems were expensive (about $5,000 in today’s money) and primitive (the only way to turn off the system was to remove the belt from the compressor), sales were understandably slow. We do on site car ac compressor replacement near your area in all Miami-Dade County.(first posted, updated ) As I detailed in Part 1 of this series, Packard, Cadillac, and Chrysler all dabbled in automotive air conditioning between 19.
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