How do I get a car ready for winter?

Nothing about a car actually breaks because of winter. Cold simply exposes everything that was already marginal — a tired battery, thin tread, weak antifreeze, worn blades — all at once, and usually at seven in the morning.

Safety

What you'll need

• Winter-strength screenwash
• New wiper blades
• Silicone grease or seal conditioner (optional)
• A soft de-icing scraper (optional)

Step by step

1. Have the battery tested.Cold reduces the charge a battery can deliver at exactly the moment the engine is hardest to turn. A battery that is fine in September and four years old is the classic January failure, and a free test at a garage tells you in minutes.
2. Have the antifreeze strength checked.Coolant loses frost protection over the years. Most garages test it in a couple of minutes. A frozen engine block is a repair bill that dwarfs everything else on this list.
3. Switch to winter-strength screenwash.Read the temperature rating and mix accordingly, often much stronger than the summer ratio. A frozen washer bottle on a salted motorway is a genuine safety problem, not an inconvenience.
4. Fit new wiper blades before you need them.Blades that smeared in October will be useless in December when they are also being frozen to the glass every night.
5. Check tread depth and pressures.Cold air is denser so pressures read lower, and wet and slushy roads need every millimetre of tread. Aim to go into winter with well above the legal minimum.
6. Consider winter or all-season tyres.Winter compounds stay soft below about seven degrees, which is most of a British winter. All-season tyres are the realistic compromise for the UK and remove the storage problem.
7. Treat the rubber door and boot seals.A smear of silicone grease or a rubber seal conditioner stops doors freezing shut and stops seals tearing when they are forced. It takes ten minutes for the whole car.
8. Clean the lights and the glass properly.Winter road film cuts light output dramatically. Clean headlights inside the wash routine, and clean the inside of the windscreen too, which is where most misting problems begin.
9. Check the heater, blower and heated screens work.Everything for demisting needs to work before the morning you need it. Run the air conditioning as part of it — it dries the air and clears the screen far faster.
10. Deal with damp in the car now.Wet mats and a damp boot are what cause windows to mist. Dry the carpets while there is still some warmth in the year.
11. Restock the winter kit.Scraper, de-icer, torch, blanket, warm layers, a phone power bank and something to eat. Kept in the car, not in the garage.

Tips

• A silicone or seal conditioner on the door rubbers is the cheapest win here — a frozen-shut door on a work morning is worse than it sounds.
• Keep a bottle of screenwash in the boot from November. Motorway salt spray empties the bottle astonishingly fast.
• Take one longer drive a week if you can, so the battery genuinely recharges rather than slowly draining.

Common mistakes

• Leaving it all until the first frost — The morning of the first hard frost is when everything fails at once and every garage is fully booked. All of this is easy in October and impossible at seven on a December morning.
• Topping up the coolant with water through the summer — It dilutes the antifreeze concentration, so a system that was protected to minus thirty may now freeze at minus eight. It is invisible until it cracks something.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask