Car Battery Failure Warning Signs

Car battery failure on bygone vehicles

To be honest we do not seem to get the number of cars turning up for a new battery on their car, without the customer having a battery test first. A few years ago you would know when the battery was getting ready to be replaced, because it would slowly but surely start to let you down after a period of time. I always used to say that the battery gave you time to save up for a new one.

The old battery would let you down by starting to turn the engine over at a slower pace over a period of time, until eventually the cars battery would give up on you and you would have to buy a replacement battery. I am going back to the days of the Ford Granada and the Vauxhall Victor, both cars were very big and powerful with matching batteries (big and powerful).

As a guy who has always sold batteries we have marketed many different makes of batteries. In the seventies and eighties we sold British made batteries, such as Apollo-Power batteries and Tungstone batteries along with Exide and of course the famous (I told em Oldham) as advertised on TV. Battery makers would deal with small companies like ourselves, as long as we bought a hundred units or more, this gave a great chance to compete with the bigger companies and multi-nationals of that time.

We also used to test a battery with a great big battery discharger that looked like and worked like a four bar

Older cars like this Ford Cortina would make their batteries

 last much longer

electric fire. You would put this onto the battery terminals until the battery acid started to bubble, at that stage the customer was told that they needed a replacement battery. This method was not very efficient but it was the only thing that we had to use in those days.

What affects the car battery in today’s modern vehicles                         

Today’s cars are completely different animals. The batteries on some cars will now last five to seven years, without needing replacement, especially the cars from Japan and South Korea. I think that it is because the cars have better electrical systems than European cars, such as Renault and Peugeot. Other than a faulty alternator, the batteries on more modern cars will just fail on you and unlike their older counterparts, will often need replacing almost straight away. So the first sign may be dimming lights or a bad reading on the cars ammeter. If this happens then buy a new battery, otherwise the old one will let you down where you least expect it to.

Also the batteries go at a faster rate because the modern cars have many more electrics than their older counterparts. Everything is now controlled by the car electrics, doors, windows, car computer, not forgetting the power of the cars modern lighting systems, all this adds up to the rapid decline of the power of the cars battery, when failure is imminent.

Peak times of the year for your battery to fail are in winter, when the weather can be very cold, or the summer when the weather is very hot. Many drivers know about winter and the cold affecting the car battery, but not the summer. What the summer does is to help to boil the acid in the battery. On very hot days and in hot countries, it is not uncommon for the acid in the battery to boil away completely, with the hot weather combining with the hot state of the engine will actually boil the battery acid and force the acid out of the battery vents. When the car cools down at night the battery is left empty and then fails. Of course if you know about this then you can keep topping the battery up, therefor keeping the battery alive and in good condition.

The most common thing that kills your car battery is AGE. If you think that the battery has failed you after say a couple of years then you should get the battery tested, this can be done at most garages or Auto-centres for free. Another type of customer that we like to see is the one that has just bought a second hand car. For some unknown reason, I reckon that at least half the batteries fail after the first six months and because they do not know that much about the cars history, then they buy a new battery, and that’s great for us.