Background:
After reading about portable refrigerators and newer cars offering small refrigeration units, I felt as though both had great components with plenty of various uses but were still lacking in features.
Built in car refrigerators are only able to work with the car on leaving items to go bad after about an hour if the car was off or broken down, are only made and sized to hold beverages, and most aren’t able to have temperature control outside of using the air conditioning. Some have the power to keep items frozen rather than just refrigerate, but the user can only choose one or the other. Portable refrigerators run off their own battery and solve the issue of melting ice and waterlogged food, but also only allow refrigerating or freezing items.
Portable refrigerators had more useful features than the cars’ refrigeration units as the built-in refrigerators are merely a feature of the car itself. When considering traveling with groceries, neither of these cooled storage options cover all the bases.
Problem:
How can we provide cooled storage that allows drivers to travel with their groceries that can account for various situations like a large grocery trip containing frozen and refrigerated items, grocery delivery drivers, users that live far out in cold rural areas but would like the heat on in their car, and people taking their groceries to an event for a meal outdoors where their car would be off?
Conjecture:
This is a refrigerator and freezing unit that is built into the bottom of the trunks cargo area where the spare tire well typically is. Moving the spare tire to the trunk hatch gives room for this component. This provides two insulated compartments that operate on independent thermostats from one another allowing one to be off while the other is on or one on a freezing temperature while the other is on a refrigeration temperature. Like the portable refrigerators, they each run off their own batteries allowing users to keep items cold while the car is off. This unit would also have a storage compartment in each of the two sections containing collapsible crisper boxes for storing fresh produce.
