Better Air Filtration Could Be Next Luxury Car Battleground

The average American spends about five years of their life in a vehicle, but the average vehicle is ill-prepared for air pollution and wildfire smoke.

An automobile passes along Highway 128 in California during the 2020 Hennessey fire.

The checklist for a safe car trip in the era of climate change goes a little something like this: four-wheel drive to handle more intense rainfall, two-way charging to withstand a blackout, and seatbelts all around because EVs are dangerously heavy. Drivers dealing with wildfire smoke might add one more accessory to the lineup: five small air filters taped to a box fan.

This little Apollo 13 apparatus, which can be plugged into a car’s cigarette lighter, is known as a Corsi-Rosenthal box. It was developed by Richard Corsi, dean of the college of engineering at the University of California Davis, and his buddy Jim Rosenthal during the worst days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it became clear that school districts weren’t taking air purification seriously. Today, Corsi is similarly irked by the auto industry’s lackluster approach to the air inside its vehicles.