A/C running when A/C and auto buttons indicate off

congrats!
try turning the temp down to 'low'.
btw, you want to post in gen5 forum for your new car.

 

"AUTO" light on means full automatic. "AUTO" light off means something is not in automatic mode. The AC could still be.

AC light off can either mean "off" or "automatic". The multimedia Climate screen can show whether it's actually in automatic or not.

Press the AC button twice so the light is off, and it should then be manually off. Whenever you touch a control, that part of the system switches to manual. Pressing AUTO puts everything back to automatic.

(Except there is a config setting to control whether AC is ever taken to automatic. It's possible to make it so that only ever has manual control).

 

It's a heat pump system, sometimes when you fire-up the control vents are moving and you'll catch a wiff of cold air. The cold air will stop after a minute or two. I keep my climate control fans on low, so this happens to me also - usually no more than a minute or so.

Hope this helps...

 

Let me see if I got this right: it's 80° out you set it to 70 and you're wondering why the AC is on?

 

If you have a scan tool that can show live data from the HVAC ECU (which, for traditional reasons, they probably still call 'amplifier'), you can probably confirm whether or not the compressor is running at these times, and see what the various control inputs are at the time, which will probably shed light on why it's running, if that's what's happening.

Don't overlook what KMO mentioned in #3: the car may have a config setting (I adjusted mine using Techstream) for whether you prefer A/C being activated automatically when in AUTO mode, or only when you activate it. In my gen 3, I changed that to only when I activate it. I don't know exactly what adjustments are provided in a Prime.

Even with "only when I activate it" configured, a gen 3 will still silently add A/C when windshield-defog mode is selected. And in a Prime, given that it's a heat-pump system, the question of when that compressor runs won't be as simple as in a car where it's only used for A/C.