Of course you shouldn’t leave a bag of fresh fruits in a very hot car, but when it’s freezing cold outside? This is what you should pay attention to.
As the outdoor temperature drops below freezing, a parked car can quickly transform into a mobile freezer. This creates a surprisingly hostile environment for many everyday items we typically transport or store there. While most people instinctively recognize the danger of leaving items in a hot car during the summer, the potential for cold-induced damage to inanimate objects can be underestimated.
It’s easy to fall into the habit of treating your car like an extra storage closet or a secondary garage, leaving essential items from groceries and electronics to medications and personal care products tucked away in there for convenience. However, leaving certain items in a car during winter or in freezing temperatures can be as bad as leaving them in a hot car.
Prolonged exposure to cold temperatures can cause irreversible physical and chemical changes in many common items. The next time you park your car for the evening or plan to leave it for an extended period in the cold, think about everything you’re leaving behind. You may be setting yourself up for an awful surprise the next time you go to your car.Phones and tablets
Our modern phones and tablets rely on lithium-ion batteries, and those things really start struggling when the weather gets cold. The sweet spot for these batteries is usually between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit. You can expect performance to start dropping off pretty quickly once the temperature even just dips below freezing. When temperatures actually hit that freezing point, they slow down the chemical reactions happening inside the battery itself.
What happens is that the electrolyte inside the battery starts thickening up. This process slows the movement of lithium ions between the electrodes and also boosts internal resistance. This whole slowdown is why your device suddenly thinks its battery is totally dead, causing it to unexpectedly shut down right when you need it most.
It’s not just the battery; The actual physical structure of your device is also at risk. The glass screens on these gadgets get way more brittle and can easily crack if you accidentally bump the device against something. If it’s really cold outside, the liquid crystals in older LCD screens might freeze or become sluggish. That means you get delayed response times, or sometimes even a permanent failure.Laptops
If you leave your laptop just chilling out in a freezing cold car, you’re taking a huge gamble with the battery and the valuable data you keep on your hard drive. The real problem starts right when you decide to take that frozen device and bring it inside into the warm air. That rapid temperature change can actually cause moisture, or condensation, to start forming right inside the laptop’s case.
Invisible water droplets can cover the internal circuitry of your device. When that happens, if you try to turn it on, you might end up short-circuiting the components, leading to costly repairs or total device failure. Besides the immediate risk of a short circuit, extreme cold can wreak havoc on the chemical composition of your laptop’s power source. Most modern laptops use lithium-ion batteries, which rely on chemical reactions that slow down significantly in freezing temperatures.
Even the most reliable laptop brands can’t stand up to freezing temperatures. This often causes the device to shut down unexpectedly, even if it seems to have battery life remaining.Batteries
If you leave your everyday batteries (like AA, AAA, or D cells) sitting out in the cold, you can expect them to lose their charge fast. What happens is that the low temperatures boost internal resistance, and that’s the mechanism that sucks the life right out of the power those batteries are holding. If you try using a frozen battery in a gadget that needs a lot of juice, you could actually permanently damage the battery’s capacity.
This issue happens because the cold dramatically slows down the essential chemical reactions inside the battery that need to happen to create electricity. So, even if a battery was fully charged, it might seem completely dead, or it might discharge really quickly when you try to use it in freezing weather.
Beyond the annoying power loss, leaving those extra alkaline batteries in your car „just in case“ could actually destroy them physically. When those electrochemical reactions get messed up, the batteries can crack and start leaking corrosive chemicals. That means your glove compartment or the electronics they are stored inside could be ruined.Pepper spray
When you are putting together your winter emergency kit for your car, you might think that self-defense tools are a must-have. You should know, though, that leaving pepper spray in your vehicle when it is freezing outside can make the device totally useless. It might even make it dangerous. The formula inside the pepper spray canister is kept under pressure. If you expose the can to freezing temperatures, that pressure can drop, which makes the can useless.
If you are in a situation where your life is on the line, a failure or even a delay in discharging that spray could be disastrous. The nozzle mechanism itself might freeze shut, or it could even crack.
The chance that the device fails to work is not the only risk you face here. Pepper spray canisters have the exact same weaknesses as other aerosol products you might use, like hairspray or spray paint. When they are exposed to frigid temperatures, these pressurized cans become unstable. This can cause the liquid inside to expand, or it can make the propellant gas act completely unpredictably. When things destabilize like that, the cans can crack and might even explode.
