Cold storage: maintaining your car in winter months

Well, there’s no use fighting it anymore: frost on the windshield, the leaves stripped from the trees, your breath hanging in the air. Winter is coming, and soon we’ll all be up to our eyeballs in frost giants and white walkers and Coca-Cola-swilling polar bears.

As such, perhaps the oil’ droptop isn’t quite an appropriate winter conveyance, novelty fur hat or no. It’s time to tuck ‘er away for the winter, warm and snug until the spring emerges and the salt is off the roads.

Here’s your guide to making sure you’ve secured and stored your machine properly for the winter months. Get things clean: If you’re a DIY type, cleaning up your car before winter storage is a highly satisfying feeling, right up until your cold-numbed hands drop the sponge in a patch of gravel.

Clean, dry and preferably waxed is the best condition to have your car in before it goes to sit for months. Salt and moisture are obvious culprits, so make sure it isn’t just a surface clean and make sure there’s a chance to dry before covering things up. Storage places: There are two luxuries in any automotive life. The first is having a garage, and the second is having some way of keeping that garage from getting filled up with useless crap, leftover recycling and sporting goods.

If you’re lucky enough to have both, then great! Just chuck your machine in the old car-hole and you’re good to go. If you don’t have any garage whatsoever, you don’t just have to leave your pride and joy frozen to the curb. Often, local high-rises will have an extra parking spot or two in the underground you can rent. Fuel up: Over the course of a winter, especially in a colder garage with fluctuating temperatures, your fuel tank can be a magnet for moisture. With older cars especially, that means rust and a clogged fuel filter come spring.

The simplest way to combat this is to fill up the tank before you park for the winter, particularly with higheroctane, low-ethanol fuel. A smaller volume of empty air in the tank will help prevent moisture buildup and will dilute contaminants. Maintaining a charge: When you throw the covers off in the spring, the last thing you want to hear is the rrr-rrr-rrr of a wimpy battery failing to give the starter enough juice. In a private home, a plug-in battery tender does a good job of keeping the amps and the volts charged. This is especially important with Porsches and the like, as they often undergo a constant drain. For older, simpler machines, just pop the battery out entirely.