Helping your car beat the heat this long hot summer
If you haven’t heard, June was the hottest month. Period. For the Planet Earth, since we started keeping track 140 years ago. Don’t believe me? Greenland has been having wildfires.
Greenland.
Not only do you have to have plants in the first place to have wildfires, but then those plants have to dry out and get hot, can catch on fire, and keep burning. That’s true throughout the Arctic, which is, in general, on fire.
And July? July will be hotter. In fact, the last cooler than average month was during the Reagan Administration.
This has been particularly relevant to me, personally, as the AC in my car has decided that it will no longer C the A when the outside temperature gets over about 85. Which, as many of you will recognize, is pretty much exactly when you want it to work the most. It does cool for a couple of minutes, just long enough to get my hopes up, and then abruptly starts giving me lovely warm, humid air.
Your car needs heat in moderation to operate, but these 80- and 90-degree days are not its friend, although you do get your best gas mileage now. That’s about the only fluid that’s happy with these temperatures. So here are some things you can and should do during the hottest months to get you both through.
Check your tires
Things expand when they get hot, right? That’s true for the air in your tires, which get even hotter from friction than the 140-degree pavement they’re rolling on. Most blowouts happen on the hottest days, so think about how much you want to be changing a tire on the side of Highway 153 at noon. Heating and cooling can cause your tire pressure to get low, so pump them up and don’t be the jerk driving around on them with no tread left.
Top off all your fluids
All fluids can boil, and when it happens to your brake fluid, you have no brakes. Ask any trucker making the trip down from Asheville. In addition to your coolant and engine oil, you have power steering fluid and transmission or clutch fluid. The inconvenience or danger of those failing varies, but they’re all pretty much avoidable.
Don’t idle
Modern cars are amazingly good at being able to idle in hot weather, so unless you’re driving a 1962 Plymouth Valiant (or my stupid ‘73 Chevy C/K), you’re not likely to vapor lock or boil over. But it’s also really bad for your car, and the environment.
If you’re idling in hot weather you’re probably running the AC, so your car is working hard which means it’s burning more gas. Cars depend on the flow of air through the radiator to cool the engine, and all that increasingly hot exhaust has no air to take it away from the underside of the car and shortly thereafter, your feet.
One of the skills of adulthood is thinking about the consequences of our actions. Not just the obvious or convenient ones, but all of them.
Understanding and thinking about what’s going on with your hot car is a recipe for avoiding a whole lot of problems.
David Traver Adolphus is a freelance automotive researcher who quit his full time job writing about old cars to pursue his lifelong dream of writing about old AND new cars. Follow him on Twitter as @proscriptus.