You’re right; he did try to hotwire it. The camera angle makes it appear that he is prying something above his head, but it’s actually the steering column. Very strange illusion—I’ve replayed it several times and still can’t figure out where the camera is.
This might be a bit fan-wanky, but… the place Walt is hiding out probably has a ton of cabins that are only occupied during the summer months. A lot of people with vacation cabins keep old beater cars up there and so the owner might not have noticed it missing for months. Perhaps Walt specifically stole a car from a cabin that was obviously boarded up for the season for just that reason.
(And a 80’s Volvo 240 is EXACTLY the kind of car I would expect some person from one of the east coast cities who owns a vacation cabin in New Hampshire would have as an old beater. I think the showrunners did a great job of picking cars for this show.)
He stole it from a street near enough to the bar that you could see police lights as they went by.
It was just a single cop car prowling around, though, not all the cops in the area rushing to the bar. My interpretation of the scene was that it’s at least an hour or so later and the local cops have spread out to search the wider area, having missed Walt at the bar. The ice on the inside of the windows implies that he’s been trying to get the car started for a while, so if it were right outside the bar he would have got nabbed when they showed up.
Not bad! I like that explanation. This even helps explain why the keys were on the visor. It makes sense to keep the keys in an easy-to-find location if you use the car that infrequently.
Now, I think we really were supposed to think that the car was not all that far from the bar. But there’s nothing shown that requires that interpretation.