That's funny -- my Honda was also a '96 Civic. I remember picking it up and the salesman going out of his way to show me that it really was normal for the car to turn the A/C on automatically -- apparently they'd had a lot of people reporting it as a problem when it was supposed to be a 'feature'. Problem was that when the compressor kicked in on the Civic it felt like the engine just lost a cylinder, so on hot days I got in the habit of clicking off the A/C whenever I needed some extra acceleration. I've only had my P5 for about six weeks and I've only used the A/C a couple of times but it didn't seem to suffer nearly as much of a power drain, thankfully.