I had thought about this awhile ago, and then it slipped my mind until today. I left work to head home and it was cold, colder than it has been in awhile. I got into the car (2 year old Mazda 3), which had been sitting outside all day, and it was cold. So it's cold outside, the car is cold, and since I'm still not 100% recovering from an absurdly powerful stomach flu of some kind, I'm cold. I wanted to blast the heat, but of course if you do that you just blast yourself with cold air. Are we seeing a pattern here? Right. The cold. My problem here, and this isn't something I had ever really thought about, is the speed at which my car warms up to the point of being comfortable. My drive home took about 25 minutes; by the time I got home, the car was warm. That's not acceptable. My previous car (a Honda CRV) used to get Sahara hot in about 20 seconds. It was amazing, and I took it for granted. Now, I'm stuck with an icebox. My entire car ride home, every day in the winter, is cold. So the next time I buy a car, I'm going to ask the salesperson, "How quickly does the car get hot?" I want my ass to be on fire. And I want to test it too. I'll probably get a new car in a couple years, probably during the winter, and you can be sure I'm going to check this carefully. I don't know if anyone ever uses "the speed at which a car heats up" as a criteria for making a purchasing decision. Screw horsepower, gadgets, color and price. When will my freaking fingers defrost? If you sell cars in Canada (except Vancouver where it almost never gets cold), then your car should heat up in a couple minutes, end of story. I have no idea what's wrong with my car, maybe it's broken, but it's always been like that, and I just think it's something that probably wasn't that significantly considered. Once you're past the stupid "zoom zoom" commercials, crash testing (admittedly important), and naming gray something like "sizzling silver" (or God knows what), I guess there's not much time left to check if the heaters actually work. (Technorati Tags: mazda, cars, honda)