Cold Weather Affects Vehicles
It’s no doubt that in Canada, cold weather affects vehicles in many ways. With this weather comes many undesirable issues with the operation and functionality of our vehicles. For this reason, there are a few things we can do to ensure our vehicle stays in the best shape possible. The last thing we need is to be stranded somewhere in negative temperatures! So in hopes of raising awareness for vehicle maintenance, here’s a few cold weather issues and how to avoid their consequences.
Your Battery is Dead
One of the most common ways that cold weather affects vehicles is having a dead battery. If your battery is dead, you’ve basically got only a few options if you plan to get your car started. The first, and perhaps the most viable option is to ask a friend to give you a boost. This will require booster cables and the knowledge on where to connect the cables to. Although it sounds simple (positive connects to positive, negative connects to negative), it is still important that you understand the order you connect the cables in, along with a few other things. You can always call a professional to give you a boost too!
Cold Weather affects Vehicles by Making Tires Deflated
If your vehicle is equipped with a TPS or TPMS, you might have seen that the cold weather affects vehicles by having deflated your tires a bit. This is completely normal. For this reason, you should check your tire pressures at least once every 1-2 weeks. Even if your car isn’t saying that you have low tire pressure, it’s still not a bad idea to check anyway. But for those who do not have tire pressure monitoring systems, you should be checking your pressures even more frequently.
Even if you’re just doing a visual check every time you drive your car, that will be okay on a daily basis. But still make sure that you’re finding yourself a tire gauge and physically checking the pressures from time to time as the accuracy may decrease with the temperatures.
Lagging Visual screens
Cold weather affects vehicles inside also by causing the visual screen inside to become somewhat laggy. This is because as the weather decreases, the molecules inside the screens slow down as well. If you’re noticing this, it is not a terrible thing. There’s really no way around it other than to just let the vehicle warm up. As the inside of the vehicle warms up, the screen will go back to functioning as they normally would.
Oil is Very Thick
If the car is sitting in extremely cold weather, the oil will also tend to get extremely think. Most times this can be avoided through plugging in your car as the vehicles block heater component will work at warming the engine up to a reasonable temperature. When oil is too thick, it is unable to move around to the different areas of the engine and posing a risk of seizing the vehicle’s engine.