The tragedy of preparedness (inept)

[dreamshark]

 My car battery is dead. Dead as the proverbial doornail. I dimly remember that I knew the thing was getting weak but had decided to wait until fall to replace it because it started the car perfectly well during the summer. Then fall came and I pretty much stopped driving and forgot about it. Now it is 14 degrees and the battery is so dead that the electronic fob won't even unlock the doors. 

But that's okay, because I have a fabulous emergency road kit with a battery jump starter in it!  If it's really truly deceased (and this is a 6-year-old original equipment battery, so it probably is) I should still be able to charge it up enough to drive it to a battery store and get a new one, like I did with Dave's old Volvo.

Anyway, I could do that if I could find the car starter kit.  :-(

Comments

[quadong]

You remind me of a recent experience. I bought a second car, used. Turns out the battery was right at the end of its life, so if you drove the car every day, it was ok, but would be dead if it sat for two days. Realizing this, I was going to take it to get a new battery, and we have a nifty cigarette-lighter-to-cigarette-lighter charging cable, which is slower than using jumper cables, but also means you don't have to worry about electrocuting yourself or battery gas explosions.

As I was setting this up, I crushed one of the connectors in the car door. Whoops. But I have jumper cables too. But they wouldn't reach from the dead car to anywhere I could get the live car because of where other cars were parked. But I should be able to roll the dead car out of the parking space. Except it's an automatic transmission, so you can't just put it in neutral. Except (I found on the Internet) you can flip a little panel up and release the electronic shift lock. But that didn't do anything, maybe because the battery was dead? Oi oi oi. Eventually our neighbor moved his car.