So, here’s the difference between how the Ascent’s AC seems to work and some other vehicles’ AC seems to work.
Other vehicles blast the coldest possible air until the car is cooled. The Ascent, especially when recirculation isn’t on, seems to vary how much it cools the air based on the outside air and inside air temperatures. For instance, if recirculation isn’t on, and it’s 70° outside and 80° inside, and you set the AC to 68° or 70°, you won’t feel cold air blasting out of the vents. It’ll pump in the outside 70° air to cool the cabin to that temperature. That saves robbing engine power by avoiding spinning up the compressor.
The alternative, for those who like feeling those cold blasts of air is to spin the temperature dial to “LO”, which puts the AC on full blast, full time, and then dialing it down when the interior is the temperature they want.
Alternatively, if one switches the system to “FULL AUTO” instead of “AUTO” (press the temp button to switch modes), the system is more likely to do max cooling if there’s a big temp difference between the interior temp and what’s selected. As it gets closer to the desired temp (with a similar outside temp), it uses more of the outside air (and thus the vent air doesn’t feel as cold) and spins down the fan speeds.
Hope that helps explain why the AC doesn’t necessarily feel as cold as expected.
Be warned that the A/C in the Ascent is weak. At 90 degrees you have to run the a/c on MAX and use the paddle shifters to keep the RPMs up. Unless there is something wrong with ours then this is not really a very good A/C. Our 2003 Ford Escape pours out cold in under a minute. The Ascent takes several miles to get cold, and it is never real cold.
The Ascent I test drove had kick a** AC. We are in the South and it was pushing upper 90s when we had our test drive.
