A word of warning for fellow X-308 owners out there, w/o tinted windows in their cats.
We have been having brutal heat and sun of late, as well as records high temps, here in the Dallas area. Yesterday I had a basket of laundry in my front passenger seat, getting ready to head to the laundromat. I first stopped off at my office for a couple of hours, and then headed to the laundromat. When I got to the laundromat and began putting my clothes in the dryer, I was stunned to find that the big dark brown bath towel on top now had what appeared to be 3 big wide bleach stain spots in it. In the center of one of them, the fabric was almost entirely gone in an area the size of a nickel. I checked my bottle of bleach, and verified that it had not been leaking and was actually underneath the towel under some other clothes.
I showed the towel to the laundry attendant, who is a friend of mine, and she opined that the damage was not done by bleach but by something hot actually burning the towel (although there were no scorched or blackened areas). I told her I didn’t put anything on top of the towel.
After the attendant and I scratched our heads and thought a bit more, we finally realized that what happened was that the sun, passing through the windshield with the latter acting like a giant magnifying glass, had burned the three areas of the towel, burning almost completely through it in the worst of the three spots. If it had not apparently been for flame-retardant additives to the towel (which was less than a year old from W-M, btw), it likely would have gone up in flames, then the entire basket of clothes, and then my whole kitty.
I don’t know if it’s some unique aspect of the X-308 windshield (it does have the rain-sensing feature to it and, I believe, the automatic-dimming one as well, if either makes a difference) that created this situation or not. Also, I don’t know why the sunlight doesn’t do the same to the leather + vinyl seats, but then maybe it doesn’t hit the seats at quite the right angle to achieve the effect. Bottom line is don’t keep any clothes in hot weather in direct sunlight in your car, just in case.