In most parts of the country, winter is yielding to spring. Temperatures are warming up, and people are beginning to step outside to enjoy them.
As spring, well, springs, it’s also time to start thinking about de-winterizing things, and your car is a prime target. The winter months can be very hard on an automobile and can definitely decrease its life span. Here are five things you can do at the end of winter to extend the longevity — and safety — of your vehicle.
Give your car a thorough washing. Most of the time, an automatic carwash does a good enough job, but if there’s one time per year when a manual job will make a difference, it’s at the end of winter, when you really need to access those crevices.
If you’re going the manual route, make sure to use soap that’s good for auto paint, as other soaps can be harsh and scratch the paint. Also, don’t use a power washer; instead, use a garden hose and water from a bucket. A power washer can easily damage the paint.
Is it expensive? Not really. You can get everything you need for a good car washing for about the price of an automatic wash, and then you’ll have most of the gear on hand thereafter. The time investment is minimal, just 30 to 45 minutes, and your car will look stunning once it’s free of all that winter salt and grime.
Drive over a garden sprinkler. After you’ve washed the car, consider driving it over a garden sprinkler to wash the undercarriage, which is very difficult to clean otherwise. Just attach a sprinkler to a garden hose, lay everything out in a straight line and then drive slowly over the sprinkler.
This does a spectacular job of eliminating salt and other winter grime and dirt from the underside of your car, where it can rust and corrode things. If you want to extend the life of your car, this is well worth the effort. If you line things up properly, it only takes a minute or two and it’s basically free — just a few gallons of water does the trick.
Replace your wiper blades — they probably need it anyway. After a long winter, windshield wiper blades are often in very bad shape. They’ve been run back and forth over icy surfaces, which can ding and dent them, rendering them ineffective at removing water from the windshield, which can be very dangerous when driving during rain storms.
Replacing the blades is easy — just move a tab or two, slide out the old blade, slide in the new one, click the tabs back into place and voilà! New blades are also pretty inexpensive at your local auto store. It’s such a simple task and so important for maintaining visibility in the rain that you should do this automatically at the start of spring.
Get your car realigned by a trusted mechanic. Bumpy, icy, pothole-ridden roads in the winter months can wreak havoc with the alignment on your vehicle, causing your car to not handle properly and cause uneven wear on your tires (which can increase the odds of a blowout).
Most mechanics can easily realign your tires for a fairly low fee, which can be worth it, since it can extend the life of your tires and also keep you from being stranded on a lonely road with a flat tire.
Go through the winter items stored in the trunk. It’s a very good strategy to have some winter survival items in the trunk of your car during the winter months. Items like a blanket, a change of winter clothes and so on can make the difference between surviving and freezing when your car fails on a cold winter night.
When the weather warms up, however, those items aren’t very useful to have around. Go through the items you have stowed away in your trunk and eliminate the ones that are really only useful in the winter. If you keep a bag of sand in there for traction, for example, pull it out now, as it’s just extra weight hurting your gas mileage. One extra blanket might be worthwhile, but you probably don’t need five. Be smart, and don’t carry around a bunch of extra weight.
These little steps will improve the longevity and the fuel efficiency of your car and keep you from getting an unwanted flat tire, to boot. Best of all, you can do all of these things in an hour or two on one of those gorgeous warm Saturday afternoons in the early spring.
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5 Simple Steps to De-Winterize Your Car originally appeared on usnews.com
