Well it is currently 6 degrees Fahrenheit here tonight in beautiful Minneapolis, MN. I am looking at the 5-day forecast and I see that it is supposed to get down to -6 degrees tomorrow and then a high of 7 degrees on Thursday. It sucks when Mother Nature is actually trying to kill you. This reminds me of last winter when my friend Farah Manning and I were at work debating the merits of warming up your car in the winter.
I was adamant that you should do it for at least a few minutes before driving off because back in my high school days I had destroyed my dad’s 1973 Opel Kadett hatchback by not warming it up. It was a sweet little lime-green German car that was destined to be mine someday until I ruined it. It was 1982 and I was 16 years old working the closing shift at McDonald’s. It was a brutally cold night in Waukesha, WI with the temperature way below zero degrees Fahrenheit. My dad had always stressed the importance of warming up the car so I knew better, but when I got out to the car late that night after work and started her up I was freezing cold and just wanted to go home. I only waited maybe 30 seconds and then took off. The car was groaning and protesting and hitching and acting funny until maybe a mile down the road it had enough and died. I'd killed the poor thing. I had to find a phone, call my dad up and ask him crawl out of his nice warm bed into the mercilessly cold outdoors to come pick up me up. The first thing he said was: “Did you warm up the car first?!” “Yes, of course I warmed it up! I don’t know why it died!” It was dumb and I’m pretty sure he knew I was lying, but he was fairly cool about it and I felt bad...sorry Dad.
(Hmm, since you’re probably reading this Dad and I am too old for you to ground me, I might as well come clean about another driving ‘incident’. Remember that time that my friend Mark Smith and I were driving your 1982 blue Pontiac Bonneville station wagon and I t-boned that other car that had pulled out in front of me at an intersection and it was raining out and you asked me if I had pumped the brakes to try and stop the car because everybody knows that if you don’t have anti-lock brakes and you want to stop a high speed car it’s better to pump the brakes rather than just slamming on the brakes, and I said “Of course I pumped the brakes but there wasn’t enough to time to stop before hitting the other car.”? Well…I don’t know if there was enough time to stop the car or not, but I definitely did not pump the brakes. I was 17 years old, inexperienced, and when faced with that car suddenly in my path I just slammed on the brakes as hard as I could and slid in to the guy…pumping the brakes never even entered my mind. Sorry Dad.)
So anyways, I relayed my Opel-ruining story to Farah, but she told me that she checked with her mechanic and was told that with these modern fuel-injected engines and better high viscosity engine oils and such that it really is not necessary to warm up your car more than 30 seconds or so. I was dubious, but I checked online and by god she was right. According to the experts, if it’s above zero degrees Fahrenheit then you should only let it run for 30 to 60 seconds to get all the fluids moving, and then drive off gently. If it’s below zero, maybe 3 or 4 minutes. Anything more than that and you're really just wasting gas and polluting the air.
But about a week after our talk it became really cold…like there were several days in a row when the high was maybe zero or 3 degrees or something miserable like that. When it’s that cold I still like to warm the car up for at least a couple of minutes, if anything just for my own comfort when I get in and so I won’t fog up the windows. So about 5 minutes before it was time to leave work I went out and started my car and came back in. I was parked facing the building, about 5 or 6 cars down to the right of the door. When I went back out a couple minutes later to leave, I opened the building door and looked to my right and all I could see was nothing but empty space between the two cars where I used be parked. Huh? Suddenly I see the back of my car slowly emerging out between the two cars! What the hell?? Somebody is f*cking stealing my car?! I simply could not fathom that this was actually happening. Why anybody would want to steal a rusty old 1997 Honda Accord with billions of miles on it was beyond me, but all I knew was that I had left it running and now some b*stard was stealing it! So I broke into a run down the sidewalk and got to the space where my car was all ready to rip this guy out of the driver seat and…yep…there was nobody driving.
When I had started my stick-shift car I had neglected to put the emergency brake on. Our parking lot is on a very slight gradual slope that you can barely even notice. So…although it took 5 minutes, it had eventually started rolling by itself and was now impatiently leaving work without me. It was picking up speed but I ran to the driver door, jumped in and slammed (not pumped) on the brakes just before it was about to hit one of the cars parked 15 feet behind it in the next row. Luckily I had come out just in time before the damn thing hit anybody else in an embarrassing low-speed collision. Lesson learned? Fathers (and Farah’s mechanic) know best: If your car is from the 70’s, warm it up for a good long while…if not, don’t.
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