Crucial Reasons to Purchase a Windshield Sunshade This Summer

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It’s not even May yet, and we’ve already experienced ambient temperatures nearing 90 degrees Fahrenheit in wooded New York this year. Grab a sunshade for your windshield. They’re somewhat bothersome to use, but incredibly useful in safeguarding your interior from the sun’s harsh rays.

Nobody enjoys entering a hot vehicle on a scorching day—those moments spent waiting for the A/C to kick in while sweat drips from your nose are the worst. However, the true advantage of a sunshade lies in its ability to prolong the lifespan of your dashboard and interior materials. The plastics, vinyl, and leather inside your vehicle do not appreciate heat cycling, particularly through extremes. Moreover, the older your car is, the more susceptible its dashboard becomes to degradation.

A little prevention is worth a lot of remedy. In this instance, dealing with a floppy windshield cover is infinitely less uncomfortable than replacing a cracked dashboard or damaged leather upholstery.

See, a car windshield transforms your cabin into a greenhouse. Short-wave solar radiation penetrates through the glass, which is absorbed by darker interior materials. That deterioration happens. These surfaces then emit long-wave infrared heat (thermal radiation). Since glass is opaque to this long-wave radiation, the heat gets trapped, creating a heat feedback loop that can turn the interior plastics of an E46 BMW into something resembling crayons.

Cracking the windows helps slightly, but reducing heat is only one part of the challenge. Modern automotive glass blocks a significant amount of ultraviolet (UV) rays from sunlight, but not all of them. And if you lack a garage or carport, a smaller solid barrier (like a sunshade) serves as your best defense. It can obstruct the visible light and infrared (heat) that bypass the glass’s internal filters to damage cabin materials.

A research paper published in the International Journal of Automobile Engineering from Aswan University in Egypt determined that covering the front and rear car windows drastically lowers dashboard temperatures. In the U.S., the Florida Solar Energy Center reached a similar conclusion in its own study—finding that dashboard temperatures dropped by 40 degrees when utilizing a sunshade. Popular Mechanics also conducted its own experiment and discovered that the cabin temperature in an older Mazda RX-7 was nearly 20 degrees cooler after thirty minutes of sun exposure with a shade compared to without.

Don’t depend on a sunshade to keep car temperatures bearable for anything alive or made of chocolate—you should still absolutely avoid leaving a dog, child, plant, or chocolate bar inside a vehicle in the sun without running the engine and A/C, even for a few minutes.

However, regarding interior protection, a bit of low-tech reflective gear goes a long way.

I personally prefer to get various styles for different vehicles. Both my BMW F31 wagon and E46 coupe feature OEM BMW sunshades—I appreciate the stark, simple “BMW” design. They possess an old-school vibe that I really like. When I owned a Z31 300ZX, I had a charming synthwave-style ’80s sunshade. My former FG2 Honda Civic had a considerably large windshield, and I had a Heatshield brand sun visor in it that I absolutely adored. It was very thick and gold-colored, which complemented my black paint beautifully.

But the ultimate sunshades are the ones that permanently attach to the glass and retract, like the accordion system I’ve installed in my Montero. I merely pull the “curtains” together when I park in the sun, and they Velcro together where they meet in the center. Fair warning, I get teased about having these all the time—people find them to look tacky—but my 25-year-old dashboard remains without a crack!

Numerous brands produce these, so I’m confident you’ll manage to find one suitable for your car. I do highly recommend splurging on a custom-fit version that corresponds with your windshield, though. These items can be a hassle to keep track of within your cabin, but at least the form-fitted models are both more satisfying and less irritating than the cheap universal choices you’ll encounter in local auto parts stores.