Winter Car Guides

Everything in this section is written for somebody who is already outside, already cold, and already late. That means the answer comes first and the explanation comes after it. If a page here opens with a paragraph about how winter can be challenging, we have failed at the only thing that mattered.

Start here if you have five minutes

The winter car checklist is the one page that covers the whole car in a single pass - glass, wipers, fluid, battery, tires, doors, locks and the trunk. It is deliberately written as a pre-season job you do once in October, because everything on it is cheaper and easier before the first frost than after it.

If it is happening right now

• Ice on the windshield - including the three things that will crack the glass, which people try in exactly this order.
• Doors frozen shut, or a frozen lock - the technique that opens a stuck door without tearing the seal off it.
• Windows fogged or iced on the inside - the counterintuitive air-conditioning trick that actually works, and why.
• Stuck in snow - and why the first instinct, more throttle, is the one that digs you in.

The pattern behind all of them

Nearly every winter car problem is the same problem in different clothes: water got somewhere and then the temperature dropped. Water on glass becomes ice on glass. Water in a door seal freezes the door to the body. Water in a lock cylinder freezes the pins. Moisture inside the cabin condenses on the inside of the windshield and then freezes there.

Once you see it that way, the prevention is obvious and it is nearly always cheaper than the cure. Keep the water off the glass with a cover. Keep it out of the seals with a silicone treatment. Keep it out of the cabin by not driving around with a wet floor mat. Ninety seconds of prevention beats ten minutes of scraping, every morning, for four months.

The three things not to do

1. Do not pour hot water on a frozen windshield. Glass under thermal stress cracks, and a chip you did not know about becomes a crack that crosses your eyeline.
2. Do not force a wiper that is frozen to the glass. You will tear the rubber off the blade and buy new ones.
3. Do not run the engine to keep warm without first checking that the exhaust pipe is clear of snow. A blocked exhaust puts carbon monoxide into the cabin, and that is the one mistake on this site that is genuinely dangerous rather than expensive.

Then buy the thing that ends it

Every guide here finishes by pointing at the product that stops the problem recurring, because that is the honest ending. The answer to how to get ice off a windshield without a scraper is genuinely useful this morning - and the complete answer is that you should own a scraper before tomorrow morning. Both halves are true and we write both.