I could feel the heat coming off it when I stood next to the repaved section. They didn't repave the parking area at the edge. Opened to traffic again, seems firm enough to drive on at 160⁰F.
this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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If the car isn't using outside air for cooling, where is the heat going?
The same way a fridge works
So, where does that heat go?
Last I checked, a fridge uses the outside air to cool the heat exchanger
Compressor heats up coolant, coolant exchanges heat with outside, cools down then evaporator cools it further, heat exchanges with cold loop then goes to be compressed again. It's the same principle that freezers and ac use, with the phase changes of the coolant you force them to move thermal energy in the desired direction.
Last I checked, my fridge works even when the room is warmer than the fridge.
Yes, and it cools stuff to cooler than the outside air, right?
Based on the image they shared, the heat goes into the refrigerant, which then goes to a radiator to transfer into the outside air.
It doesn't use outside air in the sense that the battery doesn't transfer heat directly to the outside air. There's the refrigerant between the two.
Right, that's what I'm getting at. The heat indeed gets transfered to the outside air.
It makes more sense if you read the context. They're responding to a comment that said this:
A response that says "it's not X" can be interpreted as "it's not doing the thing you said it's doing". In this case, over_clox is saying that heat transfers directly from the battery to the air.