Tracking yf
By Steve Schaeber
February 7th was Media Day at the Philadelphia Auto Show, which is a great opportunity for MACS to find out what’s going on with new model vehicle HVAC systems. Overall, we inspected more than 160 new cars and trucks, and as expected the majority are now using R-1234yf refrigerant. We saw just about every major OE, but three brands were surprisingly not on display. They were BMW, Mitsubishi and Daimler / Mercedes Benz.
Like last year, some of the OEs have completed their changeover (FCA, Genesis, JLR) with Honda being the latest to go all-yf. Still, some have not changed at all, such as Infinity and Mazda (and we assume MB, had we been able to check).
Because so many vehicles are using yf this year, we’re thinking that 2021 might be the first year we’re hunting for R-134a, instead of the other way around! At this show alone we surveyed 179 models and 135 of those contained R-1234yf (or about 75%).
Further breaking down the numbers, based on published sales data for the United States, this is what we see as the trend for OEM’s that have converted to R-1234yf. In 2018, we estimate that just over 10 million vehicles were sold in the United States with R-1234yf as the refrigerant. In 2019, this number jumped to more than 13 million, a 30% increase. This means that in 2019 almost 80% of the vehicles sold in the United States contained R-1234yf. (read more)
