One would think, but I don’t recall any disasters. They would take the car batteries into the dorms until needed. Also, back then when tires were made of rubber, they would freeze flat on the bottoms, so a drive down a smooth road was like riding on square wheels.
I heard of one fellow who sued a gas station years ago because they filled up with diesel, and it turned out to have a serous water content (presumably a problem with their tanks, and not being a major truck stop, the tank did not get refilled often.) Apparently water in diesel injectors is very bad.
I went to college in North Dakota, and we faced similar issues. Once when daytime highs were in the negative teens, I planned to travel home for a weekend (a couple hundred miles). I took my car battery into my dorm room overnight to ensure it would be warm and potent and could reliably start my car when I put it back in.
If you’re going to use the car within (say) four hours, it’s best to simply keep the car idling. Unfortunately this is often impractical, or not allowed. There is the concern of car theft, CO, etc.
Here’s a commercial from the 1950’s about gas line freeze.
I remember when I started driving in the 1970’s there were lots of commercials advertising Heet and other additives to pour into your car when you filled the gas tank, to absorb water vapor and prevent freezing gas lines.
I personally only experienced one event when my line froze, at night. I had to call a tow truck to leave it in the heated garage at a service station* and pick it up the next morning…
*(remember when gas stations were called service stations? 
)
Well, to have gas line freeze, you must have H2O in your gas tank, otherwise it doesn’t matter what the temperature is as long as its above the freezing temperature of gasoline. Since most forms of gasoline freeze at something like -100 degrees, we need not worry. If, for some reason, you believe moisture may have compromised your fuel system, they do sell additives like K-100 that absorb moisture.
Didn’t mean to ignore this; been a couple busy days at home 
Yes, generally high winged planes use gravity feed. Low wing planes typically have a boost pump someplace near the tank(s) outlet(s) for start & takeoff / close to the ground ops, while relying mostly on simple siphon feed the rest of the time.
Two other issues with GA airplanes:
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They tend to sit outdoors for days, weeks, or months between uses. Giving plenty of time for however water does get in to accumulate into a material quantity. Likewise the airport’s fuel trucks and systems see a lot less turnover than a suburban car gas station.
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The fuel filler ports and caps are on the top surface of the wings directly exposed to the elements. If (unusually) they are behind a fairing door, that whole assembly is set into a well that can act as a sump for falling rainwater. All of which places a great strain on ensuring the filler neck and cap and cap vent (if any) don’t admit water at all.
Modern fuel-injected cars have the fuel pump inside the gas tank. I believe at least some older carbureted cars used a mechanical fuel pump under the hood. So I wonder if that would affect the likelihood of moisture entering the fuel line.
On a related note, from the many perfectly good hours I wasted listening to Car Talk back in the day, I learned that carburator icing used to be a problem (and I believe still is on GA airplanes). On a cold day the moisture in the air getting sucked into the carb can freeze and constrict air flow into the engine.
That’s still an issue. The throttle bodies on modern cars (or at least some) still run hot coolant through them to keep ice from forming.
Just a slight nitpick (and if I’m wrong, a request for correction from those more knowledgeable) but I don’t think it’s about inanimate versus animate objects so much as warm versus ambient. A hot bar of metal in a wind tunnel will lose heat faster than the same bar in still air of the same temperature. And despite what you seem to imply, people won’t ever get below ambient temperature either, no matter the wind chill factor.
And while I’m sure warm inanimate objects will experience “wind chill” in the sense that they’ll cool faster in moving air, I’m not sure our quantitative measures of wind chill will apply to inanimate objects since it’s a subjective quantity intended to measure what the air “feels like” to humans who consume weather reports. There are also other factors that a metal bar wouldn’t experience, like moisture, evaporation and humidity, that I think come into play in modern “real feel” temperature measures.