Want AC In Your Racecar? Electric May Be Perfect!

Air conditioning is probably the single best comfort feature a car can have. But lot of people end up removing the AC compressors from their cars while maximizing performance. In the past, you just had to learn how to live without AC — something that is unthinkable here in the desert of Arizona. However, recent market trends have made it relatively easy and affordable to add an electric air conditioning compressor to your car.

Since air conditioning became common in cars in the 1960s, virtually all compressors have been physically tied to the rotation of the engine via a belt. When the engine runs, it spins the compressor’s input pulley. A clutch then connects that pulley to the compressor itself when you turn on the air conditioner.

That’s reliable, simple, and affordable. But various performance mods and engine swaps lead people to removing their AC compressors to make everything fit, because it is really difficult to position a pulley-driven compressor anywhere but the original factory location.

However, a compressor can also be driven by an electric motor, rather than through a pulley. Aftermarket 12V electric compressors have become common and affordable in recent years as various kind of electric vehicles grew in popularity.

As Rawrkee shows, it is relatively easy to add an electric AC compressor to a car with an internal combustion engine.

For an automotive mod, this is pretty simple. The electric AC compressor just replaces the car’s original pulley-driven AC compressor. It uses the same blower fan to push cool air into the cabin. But because it is electric, you can position the compressor itself anywhere that you have room and can run power cables. The unit Rawrkee purchased comes with its own dedicated controller, so you don’t even have to try to tie it into the car’s existing AC circuitry at all.

The only tricky part of this process is running refrigerant hoses. How you do that will depend on your engine compartment arrangement and where you mount the new electric AC compressor. You’ll need to make sure you leave yourself room and a path for the hoses.

For a basic installation, that’s pretty much it. But you can take it a step further and connect the factory buttons to the new controller, as Rawrkee did. That is pretty straightforward and will give you a much cleaner result.

Assuming your alternator and charging system are sufficient to supply the power to the new electric compressor, this should cost less than $350 to install and that’s a very low price to pay for comfort in a race car.