The modern car is a fascinating piece of engineering. You have an orchestra of mechanical parts and electronics working together to safely and reliably get you to work every day. But what happens when you kneecap a critical component in that system? Hilarity, that’s what. My 2008 Smart Fortwo kills its radio every time I shift gears, and here’s the really stupid reason why it happens.
In the fall of 2024, my great fleet reduction plan reached a point where I sold off what was then my daily driver. This prompted me to bring my long-dormant 2008 Smart Fortwo back into service. This car sat in storage for over two years because I had so many cars that I wasn’t driving it anymore.
In reducing my fleet, I’m back to driving the little car I forgot about. I cleaned off years of dirt and biological growth buildup, gave the car a fresh oil change, and dropped in a battery. The car has run great ever since with a few caveats. Admittedly, I didn’t have what I experienced this morning on my checklist.
So That’s What The Mechanic Meant
Part of the reason I retired this car in the first place was due to wear and a whole lot of tear. When I bought the car in 2020, I got a condition report that noted that the vehicle’s control arms were rusty, the front springs snapped off at their tops, and the ball joints were past their prime. They looked okay enough then, so I just drove the car as-is.
I then took the car on a Gambler 500 and multiple road trips. The front right bearing began failing during the drive to the 2022 Volkswagen Taos launch, then a wheel sensor nuked itself soon after. I eventually parked the car thinking I’d fix all of this stuff. But, sadly, I let myself collect so many cars that this poor little car became a part of what I called the “Mothball Fleet,” or vehicles too sketchy to operate regularly. The Mothball Fleet included this Smart, my U-Haul CT13, and each of the Volkswagen Passat TDI wagons. Previously, the school bus filled in that space.
Thankfully, I have sold off enough cars that the Mothball Fleet no longer exists and I have ended my lease on the space I used for those vehicles. Bringing this Smart back was interesting. In the years since the condition report and parking of the car, the control arm bushings began a conversion to Bluetooth:
As for the struts, here’s what those looked like:
Smart springs like to break off at the top. The struts still do their job, but ride height ends up about an inch lower while ride comfort is dramatically reduced. You can buy replacement springs, but the whole strut cartridge looked pretty awful to me, so I just had the whole deal replaced alongside the control arms and front hubs.
Power Up
Then came the battery.
One of the features I like about first- and second-generation Smarts is that their battery boxes are inside of the car in front of the passenger seat. This means you don’t always have to worry about corrosion or any real nasty stuff.
Usually, I buy the cheapest battery on the shelf and then treat it like crap. I cause myself to have to replace batteries more often.
Despite how much I like my Smart’s battery arrangement, Smart doesn’t give you a lot of room to remove or slide in a new battery. If you’re using a battery of the correct size, getting it in and out requires an act of tilting it at an exact angle, a lot of cursing, and a lot of scraping your hands on metal.
I thought I had the solution to this. First, I tried a lithium motorcycle battery and it was brilliant. The car ran great and the tiny battery had no problem fitting in the battery well. The only problem was that the car had less than a week of standby time before it killed the battery. There are lithium car batteries out there, but they aren’t cheap, so I went back to an older tech.
Back in 2022, Sheryl had a third-generation Toyota Prius. The car started throwing mysterious errors, including oil pressure and traction control faults.
This turned out to be because the car’s 12V battery was getting weak. So she bought a new battery. I kept the old battery because I loved its super compact form factor. It wasn’t strong enough for the Prius and its systems, but it still held over 12 volts, so I used it for my projects.
This battery has been my MVP in the years since. If I need to move a vehicle that doesn’t have a battery it was super easy to plop this little guy down, fire up the vehicle, and go. This battery was also critical in getting the ’48 Plymouth project on a trailer since the electric winch wouldn’t have worked without it.
I also figured that the tiny form factor was just what my Smart needed for easy battery replacements.
The battery nestled in there nicely great on a test fit. There was just one problem. Whoopsies, the terminals are in the wrong positions. Flipping the battery over put the terminals too far from where the car’s cables could reach, so I cobbled together an insanely janky solution where the battery sat at an angle with something propping it up underneath. Oh yeah, Prius batteries use pencil posts, so I used a bolt and a wheel weight to snug things up.
This was just supposed to be a proof of concept. It worked great! While the battery was too weak for the Prius, it worked fine in the Smart. Then, it worked so well I sort of forgot to replace the Prius battery with one that was less, you know, cobbled together.
The Sacrificial Radio
Fast-forward nearly three months and we reach this morning. I needed to get to the local Social Security Administration office to update my documents before a certain new Executive Order took effect. Honestly, I wasn’t even surprised to see that the Prius battery had finally bitten the dust. It was already several years old and it has been brutally cold in the past month.
I also did the battery no favors. I accidentally left the car’s headlights, dome light, and wipers in their automatic positions. As stupid as it sounds, leaving the automatic options activated causes a bit of a serious parasitic drain in these earlier Smarts. So yeah, I only accelerated the poor battery’s demise.
What I didn’t expect was finding out how deeply discharged this battery was. It was so dead that it gave me less than a volt on the multimeter. Still, I’ve revived trashed batteries before. So I jump-started the car and started driving.
Now, if you drive a classic car you might not see this as a huge deal. I’ve driven cars and ridden motorcycles that, so long as you got them started, ran fine with dead batteries. My old 2000 Ford Ranger and my old 2006 Ford E-Series vehicles were able to run with their batteries completely removed.
Smarts have multiple major devices on a CAN bus network and some of the systems in a Smart are particularly power-hungry. The biggest power user appears to be the transmission shift motor. Second-generation Smarts like mine have manual transmissions, but they’re automated to mimic automatic transmissions. Two important parts of this system are the clutch actuator and the shift motors.
This clutch actuator has a giant rod that pushes against a lever, which actuates the clutch as if you were pushing a clutch pedal.
The pair of shift motors sit on top of the transmission. These motors swap the cogs, simulating what you would do with a gear shift in a normal manual. One motor handles even gears while the other motor handles odd gears.
Both of these devices are ridiculously power-hungry. Even with a perfect brand-new battery and a healthy charging system, shifting gears in a Smart takes so much power that the headlights briefly dim during gear changes. So, you can only imagine the havoc when your battery isn’t good.
The usual failure mode is that the clutch actuator attempts to hit the clutch, runs out of juice, and the car just fails to move. Usually, your instrument cluster illumination will be flashing during this time and your odometer might even blank out. In an extreme scenario, the clutch actuator gets stuck in a position, so the car will actually stall out or burn the clutch.
The other common failure mode involves the clutch actuator working, but then the car fails under the massive load of the shift motors. In my experience, if you’re lucky the car just goes into limp mode. If you’re unlucky, the car misses a shift and you get stuck. If you’re having a particularly bad day, the shift motor will attempt to work and then every part of the car’s electrical system fails but the ignition system. So the engine still runs, but you have no control over it and no instrumentation. Each of these has happened more than once to me. I also help moderate a few of America’s Smart owner groups and stuff like this comes up relatively frequently and the problem usually traces back to a bad battery.
Miraculously, my Smart somehow kept enough electrons flowing that it ran and drove fine. However, the car still had rather hilarious signs of the battery issue. On every other shift, the battery light flickered. But on most shifts, you could tell how much draw there was because the radio briefly shut down. The duration of each shutdown was perhaps no longer than a few seconds and then the radio always came back. If I had on the dashboard LED illumination the lights turned off with each shift, too.
I have confirmed that the Prius battery finally bit the dust. I think there might be an internal short in it because it never gained any real voltage in over an hour of driving. Twist the car’s key to the off position and the whole car goes cold in an instant. I’m sure my car’s alternator was also super jazzed about the drive. Sadly, it was pretty darn close to an emergency when I got to my SSA office today, so I rolled the D20. I think I rolled an 11 on this one.
The solution here will be pretty simple. I’ll buy a new battery, fit it in, and send the old Prius battery to Valhalla. I still want to try a battery with a smaller form factor. But not one so ancient, of course. Once I’m done, the car will be just a decal removal and a couple of fresh panels away from being in far better shape than when I picked it up nearly 5 years ago.
All of this has been deeply amusing, but it’s also a bit of an educational tale. If you have a modern car and you’re having random warnings, flickering lights, bizarre transmission behavior, or really anything else that can’t be explained, check your battery. Today’s hungry cars like getting regular doses of healthy 12V, so it never hurts to make sure you have a good battery, and preferably one that actually fits.
I’m both glad you made it to the SSA office and sorry you had to make the trip. At least you got some good content out of it?
The problem isn’t the battery. The problem is that you didn’t use a chainsaw on said battery.
Just get some battery tenders. I don’t know how you can manage a fleet of > dozen vehicles without them.
I do have lots of battery tenders (bought a bunch from Costco when they were on sale years ago) but sadly this car never parks anywhere near an outlet. I’ve been relying on solar panels to keep the outdoor cars topped up. 🙂
Well, except in this car, anyway, since it’s been in storage for a couple of years. I probably should have bought one before this battery died. D’oh!
And a jump pack. A decent one is like $50 on sale, they’re incredibly portable (certainly more than an SLA or similarly sized car battery), and will start almost anything.
They work great for frequent or infrequent use.
Modern cars indeed really hate voltage drops. Years ago I was driving my Commodore (a VX, so built 2002) when the Speedo and tacho decided to do this weird dance. They would jump to 100km/hr and 5000rpm respectively, stay there for about a second, then go back to zero. This would repeat every 5 seconds or so. A buzzer started sounding and all the idiot lights decided to become a Christmas tree. I was driving along at a constant 50km/hr while all this was happening.
The culprit turned out to be a worn alternator regulator, causing the battery voltage to sag and upset the electronic instrument cluster. $50 and 10 minutes later the regulator was swapped and the Dunny Door was happy again.
The battery on my 3rd gen Mini died a few weeks ago. After getting it jump started, I drove it home, and whoa-boy-howdy, it did not like that. It was late-morning, so I was able to turn the lights off, as well as radio and anything else I could think of. Anglo-Germanic electronics didn’t care. The lights (interior and exterior) flashed on-and-off at random, same with the radio and seat warmers. I normally only see police on my commute once or twice a year. Of course, there was a cop right in front of me for half my drive home. Fortunately, he ignored the Mini light show and I got the car home without incident.
After replacing the battery, I had to buy a new OBD II dongle that is compatible with the Bimmercode app (as well as buy the Bimmercode app) and register the new battery with the car.
I do long for the simplicity of older cars.
What the? I can see the need to register major electrical components with the rest of the car (like a body control module or whatever), but a battery is a consumable part. What possible reason would the computer need to have a new battery registered?
The story goes:
Because of BMW’s fairly widespread use of their platforms (3rd gen Minis share a same platform across their range along with most (all?) FWD BMWs), different batteries are used with the same engine. So the battery charging circuits need to know battery specifics in order to optimally charge. That said, the car would still start and run just fine w/o registering, but supposedly a new battery lasts longer if it is registered. Maybe this true, maybe it’s all hogwash to get owners to take their cars to the dealers for battery replacement. I dunno.
Anyone who is more versed in modern BMW maintenance, please feel free to jump in and correct me.
Same thing will happen with my GR Supra. You have to register the battery and use the Bimercode app.
If you like the Prius battery form factor, try these: https://a.co/d/2dFd2qz
they slip over the skinny terminal and make it standard size.
My old 2000 Ford Ranger and my old 2006 Ford E-Series vehicles were able to run with their batteries completely removed.
Having worked in a sears auto for 15yrs, changing a battery with the car running is my go-to method for not losing computer memory. Last time our 05 Sienna battery died, advance auto had to test it, and try charging it. At that point, the van was already sitting in the parking lot running with no battery, so we went grocery shopping and I waited in the parking lot. Went back and the battery failed to charge so they warranted it.
Should I have done it that way? Probably not but I could, and it made my wife freak out.
You need one of these, I use this when replacing the battery in my Jaguar, works great:
https://www.napaonline.com/en/p/BK_7821609
With as complicated as these systems are these days, I don’t really recommend your method. It’s worked for you in the past and that’s great, but modern cars are a whole different animal. Some cars now require you to reflash the computer when the battery is changed, if not the car won’t accept it and the car won’t start.
Yeah I’ve used those in the past. Not sure if there’s any difference. Charge coming from alternator vs lighter.
Plus, I don’t plan on ever having a car that complex. It worked on my G37 (2012) which has more computer stuff than I care for, and I’m hoping it is the newest car I’ll own.
I had the battery unhooked for about 3-4 hours while I was doing some work to my ’22 Colorado, and when I finished up all the presets, trip odo and everything was still there. Pretty surprised at that.
As someone who used to have a fleet of vehicles, and was always dealing with battery & tire woes, I do sympathize. But, as I have aged—and like to visit remote areas—I cain’t be havin’ with a car I’m not sure will get me back home.
Tires in particular kinda suck because I absolutely know they’ll age out before I wear them. Still worth the money on those sudden damp patches in the mountains, tho.
There used to be several nice smaller batteries made to be supplemental batteries for car audio. I’m not sure how many are still available but brands like Kinetik or Stinger had small but powerful batteries that might be perfect for you.
They symptoms of the 12V going bad in a Chevy Volt is it throwing odd engine codes and seeming like it has electrical gremlins. And it’s a good idea to change it then because it’s under the trunk in the car, and you can’t open the back hatch from the outside if you don’t have power. If you can’t get enough power from the jump points under the hood, you have to crawl into the hatch area, remove a cover, and pop the hatch from the inside.
That’s odd. You get the exact same stupid “power hatch won’t open with a dead battery problem” with a Honda Clarity, except it’s worse because I could never find releases for the rear seats from inside the cabin. The rear seat releases are in the hatch area, which you can’t get to without opening the hatch. There’s no keyed lock for the hatch, it’s either the keyfob button or the switch on the driver’s door.
.
At least in the Clarity, the battery is up front under the hood, but if you keep your battery booster pack in the hatch where there’s a really nice space for it, you’ll never be able to actually get to it when you really need it.
I was able to solve my issue by borrowing someone else’s jump pack, but if I’d been in the middle of nowhere when my battery died in the intense cold, I would have had to break a window to get into the hatch. And on an uncommon car like the Clarity, it probably won’t be very long before it gets difficult to find a replacement.
“What I didn’t expect was finding out how deeply discharged this battery was. It was so dead that it gave me less than a volt on the multimeter. Still, I’ve revived trashed batteries before. So I jump-started the car and started driving”
…
“I have confirmed that the Prius battery finally bit the dust.”
Sounds like a good candidate for a desulfonator experiment. I have managed to resurrect old, deeply depleted AGM UPS batteries with mine.
If the battery fails that there’s always Torch and his magic chainsaw.
Years ago I’d driven my nice reliable 350Z to the workshop where my Elise (it’s real name) was in lots of bits and in several different rooms. While I was working I could hear this intermittent wiring. After a few hours I went outside and my 350Z, while turned off and locked with the keys in my pocket, was washing it’s headlights for several seconds, then stopping for a minute, then doing it again.
Obviously my first though was it was haunted, but then I started pulling fuses, and eventually got the pump disconnected, because it was on a shared fuse with an ECU because Nissan.
The garage couldn’t find anything wrong except a slightly moody battery.
Mercedes, you really gotta invest in some battery tenders. Or anyone who has more than say, three vehicles in their personal fleet, for that matter. Nothing is more disheartening than deciding to take one of the toys out only to find the battery is dead.
The unit below retails for about $25, I have about ten of these myself (or at least the model that predated it), and they are worth their weight in gold.
6-12V 1.5A Automatic Battery Charger/Maintainer BK HFMC15A | Buy Online – NAPA Auto Parts
There’s a one amp version that’s even cheaper but I only like those on powersport batteries, the 1.5 amp works fine on a standard car battery. There is even a provided eyelet harness for “hardwiring” these up, then you just fish the connector to an accessible spot so you can just keep the hood closed and plug/unplug quickly.
My Ducati would eat a battery every year because Tamburini designed the silly thing with a clock on it. With a tender on it I can get 3-4 years.
I have a similar tender/charger that I bought on sale at Canadian Tire. Heck, could well be the same with a different label. Plug in my Mustang over the winter, I think the local parts store was getting tired with the warranty battery swap every year or two.
My brother in law has about 4 of them at his cottage for the boats and snowmobiles. He swaps the batteries through the chargers every time he is up, including my boat battery, and everything fires right up.
Yep, I’ve been using the $10 Harbor Freight one on my Miata and I have a $19 Harbor Freight one on the MGB for the winter. The MGB needed the more expensive kit because the battery is behind the seat, so I wired the included plug under the hood for easier access.
They have a $15 solar one that I haven’t tried, but that would be perfect for any of them that are outside.
I second this message as I have two of these cheap NAPA tenders and have yet to not start.
Acquired first after I bought the Roadster & neglected my Subaru to the point it killed the new Optima.
I have a bunch of tenders for the vehicles lucky enough to park inside. Sadly, no such luck for this little car. For the cars stuck in the parking lot, I use solar panel-based maintainers. In my continued forgetfulness I never got around to buying one for this car!
Even if just put it on once a week to top it off, we do that every weekend with our Forester that doesn’t get driven as much, as it’s a Forester and likes to drain batteries. I just put the tender on it on Saturday, take it off on Sunday.
Agreed. Both my antique trucks are on tenders starting in November all the way through March, and I start and run them both weekly to keep things lubricated. It’s the cheapest insurance you’ll buy. Definitely install the eyelet harness mentioned above.
Fun Fact: when the battery starts to go on your 2010 Honda Fit, one of the more entertaining symptoms is that the electric power steering unit will randomly freak out, and occasionally lock up entirely mid-turn while driving. When that happens the only way to reset it is by turning the car off and starting it again. That was a fun surprise that mercifully happened without any other traffic in the immediate vicinity.
A Honda Fit is still the answer though.
Mercedes: “I absolutely, positively have to make this appointment! Which vehicle should I take? Hmmmm… well this one has a cobbled together electrical system that could render the car immobile at any second, so I’ll take that one!”
My other choice at this moment is a BMW that can’t keep itself cool. Just waiting for the temps to get a little higher before I tackle that. The sell-a-thon left me with only two cars at home at this present time. The Smart is supposed to be the reliable one of the two. Whoops! 🙂
There was a rusty Corolla on Shitbox Showdown today…
Take your bus?
The bus is parked offsite. The last time I parked it at home the association called the cops on me. 🙂
Your laughing when the radio cuts out is absolutely delightful. Honestly, what a hilarious little write up, I cannot believe how power hungry the transmission shifter is!
This whole article was interesting, but this tidbit seems completely nuts to me. That’s how it is by design? It seems like something from a Top Gear cheap car challenge.
I’d be curious to see the meeting transcripts where this came up during the manufacturer’s testing phase. Surely someone brought this up as a possible red flag, and was blown off by someone else.
That’s indeed how these cars shipped from the factory! Back in the day, Xenon bulb swaps were really popular because those didn’t dim or flicker during shifts.
That does not sound like a healthy charging system but an under spec’d one. And that can be dangerous.
Many years ago I was called out to help my Stepdad whose Ferrari 308 had a dead battery. I was close by so no big deal. We jumped the car and he drove it home with me following behind.
A few miles down the road I saw smoke and flames starting out of the back. I managed to get my step dads attention and he got an extinguisher from a nearby gas station to put the fire out. Fortunately we caught it early enough such that there was no damage. Whew!
We reasoned that what had happened was the alternator was too weak to both charge a depleted battery and provide full power to the ignition system. The weak spark did not fully ignite the mixture. This rich exhaust was then dumped into the catalytic converter which did its job of burning off the excess hydrocarbons and in doing so got hot enough to ignite the oily grime ever present in any older engine bay. The mechanic confirmed this idea. Keep in mind my stepdad absolutely babied this car to keep it perfect. This was not a case of negligence or deferred maintainance, this was a design flaw.
To avoid further such problems I’d look into a higher amp alternator and a more powerful battery with adequate gauge leads for the Smart. Maybe switching everything to LEDs too to minimize that drain.
Many years ago, Smart USA claimed that the quirks with the headlights (the other problem was headlights frequently dying) were due to the car overpowering them in the first place, leading to weird behavior any time there was a voltage change (such as during shifting). So, later second-generation models have resistors in the wiring to stop that.
There is not a higher amp alternator that I am aware of that will fit in the ridiculously compact space of that engine compartment. However, I have found that using either OEM batteries or batteries from the likes of Optima seems to reduce the electrical quirks.Thankfully, to my knowledge, there haven’t been any reported fires blamed on the charging system.
Instead, most fires relate to the engine insulation mat failing and catching fire. Other fires have happened allegedly because of corrosion or too much resistance (due to bad soldering) within the Signal Acquisition Module.
Many owners get around the “quirks” by shutting off sources of parasitic drain. In the past, Xenon lights were a popular mod because they didn’t flicker and were brighter, anyway. But now everyone’s moved on to LEDs, including me.
And yet, with that said, you have to be careful with LEDs in these cars. If you don’t get CAN bus LEDs, the car sort of freaks out. The dome light stays on forever, your parking lights flash when you hit the brake lights, and weird stuff like that.
“Many years ago, Smart USA claimed that the quirks with the headlights (the other problem was headlights frequently dying) were due to the car overpowering them in the first place. So, later second-generation models have resistors in the wiring to stop that.”
That sounds (to my decidedly non EE ears) like an over voltage problem. IIRC the fix was to wire in a Zener diode and a resistor to bleed off excess voltage. If so that’s not quite the same thing.
“There is not a higher amp alternator that I am aware of that will fit in the ridiculously compact space of that engine compartment.”
I dunno if its an option anymore but back in the day we had a local shop that rebuilt alternators. When I took mine in to be rebuilt the guy offered to upgrade its output a bit.
But yeah, if the stock output is adequate a better battery and keeping on top of corrosion is likely more productive.
“If you don’t get CAN bus LEDs, the car sort of freaks out.”
IIRC those have resistors so they match the load of halogens. If so they probably aren’t helping the electrical issues as much as one might hope.
Weirdly, Smart did acknowledge that voltage does change during shifting, but that the resistors would at least reduce or eliminate the flickering. Admittedly, it’s been so long since I last had a halogen bulb in one of these cars that I don’t remember how effective it was.
Oh that would be so cool! I’ll look into that, if anything just because the premise itself is so interesting.
Sadly, you are right that CAN bus LEDs do have resistors in them. For years I’ve been experimenting with how many regular LEDs you could get away with before freaking the car out. My current mix is side repeaters and parking lights as regular LEDs, everything else CAN bus. The car seems to be ok with that.
Of course, my main problem here is just the horribly old, ill-fitting, undersized battery that finally called it quits. But SWG has challenged me to revive it using one of those desulfating chargers. Challenge accepted!
I have had some success with desulfonating batteries. When I got a very old, very depleted pair of 12V, 7ah AGM like you’d find in a UPS. They had been used as a pair in a 24V backup. I figured I had nothing to lose by attempting to resurrect the dead.
One came back on the first try, the other failed with an over voltage error. I checked its voltage with a multimeter. It was out of spec, I think it was 15V when it should have been 13.8. It failed a few more times. So I let it sit for a couple of weeks to calm down. When I tested the battery again its voltage had dropped enough to try again. This time the process succeeded.
So an initial failure may not be the end of the story. Good luck.
“back in the day we had a local shop that rebuilt alternators”
There were a lot more of these places back when I was into car audio. It was pretty common to get an HO rebuilt alternator and then either do a deep cycle battery, trunk mounted aux batts, and/or caps if you had a hungry system in the car.
At this point people seem to care less about car audio mods, stock options have gotten better, stock audio is harder to swap out, and amplifier technology has gotten a lot more efficient even if you do go that route.
I can’t say I ever liked using caps though.
I was briefly into car audio myself. I had a pretty sweet basic setup: Alpine head unit, Alpine class A amps, Boston Acoustic Pro components front and rear with a JL Audio sub.
Unfortunately my ride at the time was too much of a squeakmonster rattletrap to properly enjoy it. Now I am fine with a cheap aftermarket touchscreen playing my phone’s music collection through bone stock 21st century car speakers.
We did a lot of Pioneer stuff, some earlyish Blaupunkt HUs, and were lucky enough to be around when PPI had their very underrated ART series and US Acoustics had some nasty stuff too. Then Memphis and some others. Fun times.
Cars are a tough place for quality audio, but I’d argue that doing it with a rattletrap is the way God intended. Only a good system can make some of those broke-car noises “disappear”.
Yup, I’m lazy now too. Mostly podcasts, haha. Still an aftermarket deck (because it’s just a better experience) but my speakers are stock atm as well. Can’t fault you there. Not worth the squeeze anymore.
Only a good system can make some of those broke-car noises “disappear”.
True, however that same system can make other broke car noises appear. Licence plate frames I hear furiously buzzing away two cars over in sync with the base from that car only do so because of the sound system. Sure that person could spend 5 minutes and $0.25 to secure that frame properly with a couple of bolts or tape but they don’t. I dunno, maybe they like the broke car sound. It goes well with the throaty, rusted out muffler.
Other buzzes can be caused by the sound system too, like the rear deck bracing in a sedan or a door latch cable.
“Fun times”
Indeed. Many of my friends into Pioneer for their Supertuner, at least in the earlier days. Some liked Proton, others Alpine, a couple saw Kenwood as a “bargain”. My first *system* was a Blaupunkt HU, 40Wx2 Denon amp powering a pair of boxed 3 way coax Polk Audio 6x9s in the back and the stock speakers up front powered by the HU only. Yes it’s a terrible setup but in my defense having all the good stuff in the back was the style of the time and I didn’t want to cut holes to put in something better than 4x5s up front.
Unfortunately a beach trip resulted in sand getting funneled straight into the VC of the 6x9s.
After that they didn’t sound so good.
We did the same shit with the better speakers in the back (6x9s) because the fronts in American cars were stupidly small and underpowered. We hadn’t graduated to components because we didn’t have the money. No shame there.
My rears (TS-A6969) pretended to be subs for quite a while until I had money for an actual setup.
No one had money for dynamat/b-quiet/whatever else was available back then, so we would weigh down body panels with peel and stick roofing solutions along with foam. Worked fine, you just had to be careful what mix you got if things got hot enough. Some of the roofing solutions would melt. Still better than a buzzy trunk or door though.
Good times.
Oh my ride at the time was a Wolfsburg made VW. Nothing but tiny, fragile paper cones as far as the eye could see.
I have respect for paper cones. You can’t get em wet but damn are they efficient and they wouldn’t rot as easily as the foam surround speakers that every import mfr seemed to be using in the early 90s.
So many 90s imports were driving around years later with absolutely no surrounds whatsoever because the foam had all detached long ago.
A fair point.
The best battery I had was in my ’95 Geo Tracker for over 11 years, OEM. That thing had so little electrical demand that I could probably have run it on a bunch of D cells if I parked where I could roll start it.
I got 13 years out of an old Walmart battery in an ’87 Volvo 240, and that thing spent entire summers just sitting, since I’d go for months via motorcycle or bike. Never bothered to keep it on a battery tender, and it would fire up like it had been driven daily.
The last paragraph is what I’ve been seeing quite a few people report on the Wrangler JL forums and it’s almost always the dual batteries in there. The OEM batteries from the factory are crap and die within a couple of years but the only reliable indicator before things start going haywire is if you watch your voltage meter and it starts to peg on 14.8 volts and rarely comes down.
And these were called Smart cars?
Look…well, you see…I got nothing. 🙂
It would be pretty hard for me to pull the trigger on a battery that’s physically smaller than the one that is supposed to fit.
Vibration is the biggest killer of lead acid batteries and the hold-downs/tray is usually designed only to fit the factory size.
I sympathize with the access being tight, but if you’re replacing a smaller sized one twice as often, it might not be worth it.
I still have the OEM 12V Battery for my Chevy Volt built in 08/16, I amazed how long this battery has survived. Its an AGM battery sitting on the trunk, the usual symptoms are random errors and behaviors.
I havent check my 73 Beetle battery but looking at the tires that were purchased in 1999 and still look ok, I wonder what year the battery was put in place.
I buy cheap batteries at Walmart, decent warranty and pricing compared to AutoZone.
Somebody had slapped a regular flooded lead-acid into my Volt, swallowed the cost of a dealership AGM. I don’t mind spending a teeny bit more if it lasts forever. The flooded lead acid went into our Escape, which had a motorcraft battery from 2015!
Tires purchased in 1999 may “look” OK but they’re not. The tire compound changes over time. This is your only contact with the pavement – I would really consider getting some new tires.
Seconded. I had a set of 13 year old tires on my ’72 Super Beetle, and they looked just fine. But I got some new ones (whitewalls!) and the difference is definitely noticeable. Quieter, smoother, almost certainly more grip.
My ex’s mom had a set of mismatched, used tires on her old Taurus. Several of them looked almost new, despite being 10-15 years old. One day, one of those tires blew and she swerved into the concrete barrier on a bridge. She was fine, the car was patched up, but I don’t think she ever bought used tires again. Just passing along, tires can be deceptive.