Today I helped my exfather-in-law with his pickup truck (for those who know my history, save your outrage. I was in an advisory capacity, telling him what to do as he did it. ) The truck, a 2001 Chevy S10, needed a new fuel pump. The truck was formally driven in West Virginia and has he was taking the fuel tank out I noticed the entire underside of the truck was nothing but flaking rust! I have honestly never seen the underside if a vehicle with so much rust. It looked like someone soaked the underside in sea water for a few months.
Being from the South, rarely do I ever encounter anything more than a light surface rust on the underside of our vehicles. The top side of the truck was in excellent condition with zero visible rust in any if the panels. I have to assume that this rust was the result of driving over salted roads during the winter. Are all northern vehicles in this bad from contending with the salt? Christ, how long does a car last up there? Personally I would be afraid to drive to this truck, afraid a steering component would fail.
When I was a teenager I remember my father telling me to never buy a used car that came from the north, now I understand what he was saying.
Salt, humidity (standing above wet grass keeps the air under that truck 100% humid… slows down drying.) and mud … mud takes longer to dry out, and provides salt…
And just using the wrong type of detergent can make a car/truck rust out, it puts salt into it as the detergent penetrates into any little crack and takes salt in with it…
Also, was the vehicles body zinc dipped before it was painted ?
A friend of mine moved from Pittsburgh to LA. When he was looking for a place to live, people said “Man, if you live by the beach, your car is going to rust!” His response to me was, “Yeah, in 5 years you’ll get two specks of rust on your bumper - these people have never seen body rust, where your whole car rusts away into a heap or scrap metal.”
This was 30 years ago, and cars have gotten much better, but cars driven where the roads are salted in the winter are still going to rust.
Not much, for the most part. My car is 10 years old, driven to ski areas and backcountry sites pretty much every winter weekend without any significant rust on the frame or body. Manufacturer rustproofing is lightyears ahead of where it was back in the 70’s and 80’s.
I’d be surprised if there was no rust on a 10 year old northern car, but the majority of cars die from other reasons, before rust is an issue.
The rustproofing at the manufacturing stage in late model vehicles has improved substantially. When Detroit was the king of auto sales they took that attitude that rust was just a factor in helping them sell more cars. Ironically, the city of Detroit is located on top of a salt mine.
When Audi started to sell in the US my dad bought one. He didn’t want it to rust out so in the winter when he drove it home he would take out the hose and spray the undercarriage to get rid of the salt. All he did was cause the thing to rust out even faster than normal. He was forcing water and the salt from the roads into the nooks and crannies. Moisture is what really facilitates the rust. Salt just increases it.
When the competition to Detroit autos started introducing cars with rust inhibitors it forced them to change their manufacturing. Cars now last a lot longer than they did 40 or so years ago.
In the UK, cars made in the 50s and 60s would rust away in ten years or less because of all the salt we spread on our roads. Similar cars sold to Sri Lanka where the climate is much warmer and dryer are still going today.
:dubious: Commuting to a ski area once per week isn’t a big deal. Moreoer, ther’es nothing uniquely salty about “ski areas” or “backcountry sites.” Commuting to work five days a week, plus all of life’s usual errands (grocery shopping, dining out, etc.), is going to expose a car to far more than that.
Moreover, the situation is worse if you live in an area that hovers near the freezing mark because you get a lot more slush, slop, and liquid water (and of course the higher temperatures encourage faster rusting as well). Southeast Michigan is particularly bad because we have more freeze-thaw cycles per year than a lot of the rest of the country. It’s an important reason or why the roads are so bad around here, and the copious amount of slush and liquid water is an important reason why cars rust so fast. I’ll wager cars don’t rust nearly as fast in Alaska.
I sold my 10YO car this spring. Lots of rust on the underbody. Brake rotor splashguards were spongy eggshells instead of solid sheetmetal. Some cancer was starting to come up from under the paint in a few areas.
Manufacturer rustproofing is lightyears ahead of where it was back in the 70’s and 80’s.
I’d be surprised if there was no rust on a 10 year old northern car, but the majority of cars die from other reasons, before rust is an issue.
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Also, for whatever reason the mountain states in the West have been traditionally far less salt-happy than the Midwestern ones. They’re more likely to just lay down sand so you can drive on the snow instead of dumping tons of salt to melt it.
Yeah, we sold a 14-year-old Taurus this year and it had rust that had begun to creep into the outer body from one of the rear wheel wells. We used the car for daily work driving in the Chicago suburbs, from when it was new. Cars are much better at being rust-proofed than back in the 70s or so (I remember that when i was a kid our worse-shape car had a small hole to the outside in the rear floorboards), but the salt and wet do not do cars any favors around here still.
I live in Boston and commute on salty roads all winter. I’m in the key salt zone, with lots of moist/cold/warm cycles. I haven’t seen significant rust on any of my cars since my 1979 Impala, and I keep them for about 10 years. It’s not a big sample size, but the threat of rust on modern cars seems awfully low to me.
There are economic reasons too, though. We scrap cars here not because of rust but because (a) they are uneconomic to repair and (b) we can afford new ones, both largely due to much higher wages than places like Sri Lanka. Closer to home, in places like eastern Europe, where they have a similar climate and drive the same sort of cars as in the UK, you do see more rusty, older cars - because they keep cars going for longer, again due to economics.
Of course a lot of those old jalopies cruising around the third world are the very same cars that were junked (and subsequently exported) when it no longer made economic sense to keep them running in more prosperous countries.
I think cities use less salt now than in previous decades, partly because they recognize the damage it does to roads and landscaping. So I think it’s both better rustproofing at the auto factories (dipping the entire body) and less salt on the roads.
I agree, although the most rusted out vehicles I’ve seen have been used in one of 2 places- driving up North where the roads were salted, or driving on the beach a lot.
They were all old vehicles though; I can’t remember any from inland Texas where the engine, transmission, and even paint bit the dust before the vehicle had any major rust. Of course, after the paint eventually comes off, they do start rusting, but that’s decades down the road.
I thought the car dealers sold rustproofing on pretty much every car for extra profit. I had some dude try to charge me, I forget, a few hundred bucks or so for rustproofing on a new car. Here in Phoenix. I didn’t know that cars rusted until someone from New York told me so in college.
I refused to pay for it. He said, “rustproofing is already on it, we have to charge for it.” I asked, “do you have tiger repellent on there too, for an extra $500? I’m not paying for it.”
Point is, I’d guess most new cars have a rustproofing treatment done before they leave the lot.