With air pollution on the rise, having an air purifier inside your car makes a lot of sense. But, with so many new cars already fitted with cabin air filters, does an additional filter make sense? We test one such product to find out.

For years, we Indians were somewhat aware of the fact that we lived – at least in our urban areas – in a highly-polluted environment. But, like so many things, this was just brushed under the carpet and nobody paid much attention to the problem. However, the situation just blew up in our faces last year, as the Supreme Court and the NGT sprang into action to take some steps to clean up the air. Suddenly, everyone became very conscious of the air they were breathing, or rather, the quality of it. And, as one would expect, this brought about another set of electronic gadgets that one could buy to clean the air in their living and office spaces.

However, the more enterprising companies even brought along a set of purifiers which were designed to be used in cars. After all, the maximum pollution is on the roads, so it would make sense to purify the air within your car too. One of these products is the Kent Magic Car Air Purifier that we tested in a variety of cars. Being a light and compact unit, the filter was easy to handle, however, it suffers the same problem as most other car air purifiers. Their awkward design means that mounting one on any surface inside a car is pretty much impossible. So, the best option is perhaps to leave it on the floor, which, at least to me, just doesn't seem right.

Using it was quite effective though, and the purifier brought down the pollution levels to acceptable limits within a few minutes of operation and we tested this using a pollution measuring device. The device is also quite silent in its operation and hardly makes any noise. However, what we noticed was that the filter was more of use in lower-end cars that are not equipped with cabin air filters. In the more premium cars – such as the BMW 328i we tested the filter in – the in-built filter of the car was also as effective as the Kent filter, making the need for a second filter redundant.

So, while the Kent Air Purifier works quite well. We would recommend that before you spend your money, you should check if the in-built air purifier of your car is effective. If not, then you should go in for a secondary filter.