I’m sorry for the confusion. I was referring to the situation involving the mountain climbers.
Like tanstaafl, my car doesn’t have a cigarette lighter (nor an ashtray.)
Mt. Hood is all ice and snow, with a bit of rock thrown in for good measure, during the winter. There is nothing up there that will burn, save what a climber may bring with him or her. More importantly, the wind blows hard on the mountain, especially in winter. Add to it the cloud cap and often whiteout conditions, lighting a signal fire wouldn’t do any good.
But stay in the car for how long? After being stranded for a week, the Kims had to have assumed either that nobody was looking for them. New accounts said they were 21 miles from the main road, on a road that was supposed to be closed for the winter. Nobody was going to stumble upon them. They didn’t see any rescue aircraft. It’s easy in retrospect to say that if the guy had just stayed in the car for two more days he’d have survived, but how was he to know that? After seven days, he concluded that he’d have to find his own way out before his young kids died of dehydration or exposure. If the searchers had found the family dead in the car a week later, all of the second-guessers would have asked why the Dad didn’t go out looking for help.
And as to your last sentence, rescue vehicles couldn’t have reached where the car was because the snow had rendered the mountain roads impassable. They had to use helicopters to retrieve the family once they found them.
Being a Boater I carry out of date by USCG standard Handheld Red Flares with me, they are more or less the same as road flare with a plastic coating on the paper tube and emit smoke as well as a red flame. I have used them start bonfires on the beach several time while out cruising when trying to light damp wood, mind you not wet but damp, they are very good at doing so. If the Kims did have road flares which is likely, I imagine that is how they got their initial fire started. Even a cigerete lighter in a running car is not going to work well to get a real fire going, a cigerete lighter in a dead car will not work any better.