Starting The Frozen Car
I watched out the window one very, very cold morning this past week as one of my kids started a ten year old car. Even though the temperature was -10 F, there was no need to get in, he just leaned in and turned the key. And of course, the eager little Honda fired right up. “How unremarkable” you might think. And you would be right. But this wasn’t always such a drama-free operation.
We have many things to complain about in our modern world. We forget (at least those of us of a certain age do) some of the ways in which life has become so, so much easier. For those of us who live up north, starting an older car on a bitterly cold morning is one of those things.
In the not-too-distant past getting a car started when the temperature plunged to, say, zero degrees (that is minus 18 for those of you who live in Celsius World) was as much of a dark art as a skill. Everyone had a favorite trick or two. I knew some who liked to run an extension cord to the car so as to keep an electric light bulb burning under the hood all night, and others who would resort to bringing the battery into the kitchen to keep it nice and warm until it was needed in the morning. I will confess to using that last one a time or two.
For those who do not remember, almost everything built before the mid 1970s lacked some things that we have come to take for granted today. In those pre-historic times anyone who hoped to get a balky car fired up in really cold weather had to understand the basics of combustion: the need for just the right mix of fuel and air which was mated to a spark to set it all off.
Spark came not from trouble-free electronics but from breaker points, a little mechanical device that opened and closed thousands of times every minute and which degraded measurably over several thousand miles. Points were one of the main reasons everyone went in for a “tune up” every few thousand miles. If they were worn or out of adjustment your margin for error would disappear on a cold morning.
And instead of a modern fuel injection system that precisely meters fuel and squirts it into just the right spots in the engine, we had carburetors. Many a young man expanded his vocabulary because of carburetors, and not in a good way. How more basic can it get than to let gasoline dribble out of a little hole to vaporize while the operator fiddles with the amount of air it got exposed to by working the accelerator pedal and the choke. Not enough gas and it wouldn’t fire. Too much gas and it wouldn’t fire – for another twenty or thirty minutes so that the soaked spark plugs could dry off.
And then there was the battery. I am too young to have lived through the era of 6 volt electric systems (that required double the power draw of the modern 12 volt systems) but even then, many a battery was not up to the task of waking up a really cold engine with its parts mired in oil the consistency of molassas.
Each car was different then. A nice new car was probably fine – just set the choke according to manufacturer directions (usually by a prescribed way of working the gas pedal). But as the car got older the whole thing became a crapshoot. One car might demand constant pumping of the pedal to get enough fuel. Another might flood easily, so pumping of the gas pedal was an absolute no-no. Each of us learned the little idiosyncrasies of our cars by trial and error. And the errors always happened on really cold mornings.
Car starting on a frigid morning was not something anyone approached in a cavalier way. Nobody even thought of just leaning in from outside and turning the key. There were preparations to make. You got in and shut the door. This assumes that your locks had not frozen you out of the cockpit, requiring another twenty minutes to get the door open as you repeatedly heated the key with the flame from a Zippo lighter. You might have looked at the dome light to get an advance read on the strength of your battery.
Then you set the automatic choke. Pushing the gas pedal to the floor and letting it halfway back up usually worked for me no matter what the car. Then it was time to turn the key and hope for the best. If you were a person inclined to prayer, this was a good time for one. The moment you first turned that key provided suspense on a level with anything Alfred Hitchcock ever dreamed up.
The most depressing sound was when your battery was unable to give you more than a single “Ruhr” followed by some clicks. Bad words usually followed. Although depressing and a pain in the rear, this problem was often the most easily fixed of anything you might encounter during the ordeal. If you were lucky you had jumper cables in the trunk and another car nearby to provide some juice.
If The Force was with you, the starter would labor mightily to crank the engine over as you listened intently for signs of life. If you got nothing after six or ten sloooow revs, then maybe another pump of the pedal. The slightest cough or change in sound indicated that good things were possible, though far from assured. It was essential that you played your cards right with just the right rhythm of gas pedal and ignition key to have any chance of the car starting before your frigid battery ran out of enthusiasm. Not everyone can win consistently at poker and not everyone could start a reluctant car in subzero temperatures.
If all else failed (as it did for even the best at one time or another) you faced a choice. If you had the luxury of time, “let’s try after the day warms up a little” was the play. If you really had to get somewhere it was time to call Vic at the Shell station and see if he could send someone out. Or, if you were someone with more mechanical inclination than money, it was time to bundle up and figure it out.
Maybe it was a frozen gas line. Modern gasolines with alcohol added have largely eliminated the scourge of water in the fuel system. Then there was the possibility that some critical part became brittle with cold and broke. I spent a day during my senior year of college dealing with this one. It was too cold for the University to hold classes but not too cold to spend a couple of hours to pull and replace a distributor with a crumbled plastic gear. In an alley. The worst part of that process was pulling the replacement from the windy junkyard because the alley at least had some houses around to break the wind. It was a miserable day and my hands are stiffening up just thinking about it.
Today, so long as you have some charge in your battery and some gas in your tank you just turn that key or press that button. All hail the automotive engineers of the world who have largely freed us from the curse of “will it or won’t it start this morning.”
As I have gotten older I have noticed that more and more of the skills honed in my youth have become obsolete. Starting balky cold cars used to be something I was really good at. This has, however, become a skill that almost nobody needs any more. And this is a trade-off that I am very happy to make.
J. P.'s Blog 
Amen! While too young to have dealt with all the fun items you mention (the alley incident sounds particularly thrilling), there have been enough experiences with cold weather and carbureted engines to remove any whimsical fantasy about the days of yore.
About the only real turmoil now with cars and cold weather is the howling alternator scenario. For whatever reason my pickup is particularly bad about that, having replaced the alternator four years ago and it howling again this week after it sat for a few days.
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No howling alternators here. My biggest car problem of the week has been the noise caused by turning front wheels hitting the icebergs that have formed in the fenders behind the tires. No way am I going to run through a car wash in this weather.
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I’m just young enough that by the time I got my license, modern cars were not so hard to start. The ’75 Pinto I had in the summer of ’86 would have been hard to start had I kept it through the winter. But my wintertime driving was limited to Dad’s ’83 Renault. It always started right up no matter how cold. But there was that one frigid day that the frozen door handle came right off into my hand when I tugged it.
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The Plymouth Horizon was notorious for breaking door handles in freezing weather. My mother broke one when she was finished with her night nursing shift at the hospital. She had to open the back hatch and climb through. She was not pleased.
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Ha! Peter Egan wrote an article once where his friend Chris Beebe went to start his new Renault Le Car in the winter and three things broke. I think it was the door handle, the hood release and the signal stalk (?)
Anyway, we always remember that one Christmas morning where the Vega wouldn’t start and the locks were frozen on the Matador so we all went back in to enjoy our presents instead of going to church.
My Caravan started Ok this morning, it did let me know that it was not happy about it. The power steering pump cavitates when it’s cold which is not a pleasant sound.
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We had one of those Christmases too, 1983. The diesel Rabbit that was in the garage with the block heater plugged in was the only car that would start. An 80 Horizon, 77 New Yorker and 71 Scamp were in the drive and would not. The Horizon surprised me, the Scamp disappointed me and the New Yorker was just itself.
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I must be living right. Went through 6 winters with the ’74 Dart and never had trouble getting it to start. That one did have the electronic ignition. The ’65 Chrysler will start fine, but it needs to idle for at least 5 minutes or it will stall as soon as you try to move.
The worst was one Christmas when the steering rack in my Aerostar froze. It would start right up and I could drive back and forth, but couldn’t budge the steering wheel a bit. Fortunately it was lined up right to put it in the garage. Left a light going underneath overnight and it was fine the next day.
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Wow, a frozen steering rack is a new one to me, something I have never even considered.
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When I was in high school I used to have to hit the starter if my truck with a hammer to start it. The good old days!
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And look at the character that you earned from the experience. It has been a long time since a hammer was a useful tool for roadside repair.
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Living in coastal California I haven’t had to deal with this much. But over New Year 1975-76 I went snow camping on Mt Shasta with some friends. One had his parents’ Mercedes 220 fintail, though I can’t remember if it was an injected SE or a lower-end carbureted version. I had my Volvo 122S with twin SU carbs and manual choke. After three days and some heavy overnight snowfalls we returned to the trailhead and dug out our the cars. My Volvo started right up, but the Mercedes was lifeless. I wanted to charge up my battery a bit to help with jumping, plus I needed to put on chains to get within jumper cable reach of the Mercedes. So I stuck my ski gloves under the throttle linkage of the Volvo to keep the idle speed up (no alternator, just a generator, and I assumed that 2000 rpm would help the battery as well as help warm up the car quicker) while I dealt with digging out some more and installed the chains Another skier came over and commented how the Mercedes was dead, but the reliable Volvo was even warming up my gloves for me.
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Great story! And isn’t that just like an old Volvo.
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Brrrrrr! Brings back a lot of frigid memories that somehow now seem sort of nostalgic. Here’s one I especially recall: When my wife and I were first married, we leased a nice little apartment built onto the back of a corner home. Our landlord was the lady who lived in the front part of the spacious bungalow. The first autumn morning that it was freezing cold out, we were awakened at 6:30 AM by the very loud roar of an unfettered car engine running wide open. It sounded like it was in bed with us. Actually, it was parked outside of the window beside our bed, about six feet from our heads. Turned out that our nice quiet landlord, who left early for work, warmed up her little ’62 Fairlane by wedging a piece of 2×4 between the seat and the accelerator, forcing it all the way to the floor. Five mornings a week, we were subjected to this unholy racket for about 10 minutes. I secretly hoped the poor little Ford would self-destruct, but it didn’t. After about a month, she knocked at our door to let us know a bank had made her an offer she couldn’t refuse for the property, as they wanted to build a new branch there. We were off the hook for the lease and found a better place, with a garage, offsite landlord and no noisy warm-ups. So, all ended well—at least for us. Can’t speak for the Fairlane.
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Wow, what a horrible thing to do to a car! I feel sorry for any later owners (if there were any).
Thanks for reading, Terry!
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Just read this one, it was recommended reading at the bottom of today’s post, 10 January 2020. I had an experience when my ’74 Dart was hard to start, and the neighbour came out and showed me the screwdriver inserted into the carburetor trick.
Similar to the Fairlane story above, I had a neighbour in the mid ’70s, who had a late ’60s Cyclone, painted in matte black for some strange reason, and they would start it up on cold mornings all winter and let the thing run for what seemed like 30 minutes at a good high rev. It had a rather loud exhaust, and it was an annoying enough of a noise that I can still recall it to this day. That engine must have been at least a 390 cu. in. or larger. They always took my favourite parking spot on the street too, just for double bonus annoyance marks.
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In my college years someone across the back alley had a 69-70 Vista Cruiser with a bad muffler. Same thing, they revved it mercilessly to warm it up. Woke me up every morning. It did not make me love Oldsmobiles more.
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