Tuesday 16 April 2013

Summertime in Motor City

A long time ago, a friend suggested that, for motorists in these latitudes, there are just two seasons, not the traditional four. The two motoring seasons are defined by the ambient temperature in your vehicle. When you need to have the heater on for most of the time to stay comfortable, it's winter. When your dominant urge is to blow cool air, or open the window, sunroof or soft top, it's summer.

By his reckoning, yesterday could have been my first day of summer - off to work in the car without an early-morning blast from the fan heater to take the chill off me and the windscreen, back home with the sun roof open. Barring a return of the unseasonable cold snap, this could be it until October.

The car heaters are going off all over Europe.* We may not see them turned on again in our summertime.


*this statement is probably not true for motorists in Narvik or Rhodes, but why let accuracy get in the way of a good sound-bite? Nobody else seems to.

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