R A Bennell wrote: > Don't know if it is coincidence or not, but several vehicles that I saw > abandoned along the road last week when it was really cold were mostly > Passats and Audis. We see all sorts of beater cars along the road when it is > really cold but the above noted brands were all pretty new and good looking > to be dead on th road. Sort of makes you wonder if they are not really > designed for cold climate. >
I've recently seen a lot of abandoned cars alongside the road here in the Seattle area, but in this case it's not the cars that couldn't handle the weather, it's the drivers. Seriously, when it snows here some people just give up and abandon their cars on shoulders and exit ramps. On Thursday morning it was really icy and I saw a lot of people had slid off the *inside* shoulder of exit ramps, too. (When a steeply banked curve is covered with ice, there's both a maximum *and* a minimum speed that will let you stay on the road...) I used to have a VW bus and it always started in cold weather. You didn't get any heat in the stupid thing, but it would run. The funny thing was it would dependably start on the fifth compression stroke. Even if the battery was so dead it would barely crank over, if it managed five compression strokes it would fire up. I started it by rolling it down hills and popping the clutch a few times, too.
