I have a 2009 SmartCar and it’s been thunderstorming hard here in Texas. Drove through some deep puddles that fan-sprayed water left and right, and a truck also pelted me with a major puddle bath. If water got into the engine air intake, what would be the symptoms?
The big risk if water gets on your intake is that your engine injests water, the cylinders try to compress it, and the connecting rods snap. This is called hydrolock. The symptom is that the car will make horrendous knocking noises and stop running instantly. If you try to restart, the noise will disabuse you of the notion that the engine is ever going to work again. If it’s still running at all, that didn’t happen.
There is also the risk that engine electronics will get shorted out by water. They are surprisingly weatherproof in general theses days, but spray them with enough water and they might short. It could either trip a check engine light or cause a no start condition. Hopefully, you’re fine. If it ran for a while after and has dried completely since, I’m guessing you are in the clear.
Well, if it’s just a little the car would sputter and cough and you might see white smoke out the back (steam, actually) for a few seconds. A lot of water can tie up the engine, hydraulic lock it, and the engine is toast. However, as wet as it seems, between the air filter element itself and the path the air follows to get to the engine, it’s tougher than you might think for ANY water to get all the way to the cylinders.
Agree with T&C with one caveat. There’s a non zero chance that you washed some degree of muck into the air cleaner housing. Assuming the filter was in good shape, it would have caught any grit but it may be compromised by the amount of crud. Take a quick look at the air filter. If it seems dry and there’s no excessive crap in there, you’re golden.
Here is a video of a guy dumping a bucket of water into the air intake of an engine. There’s no horrendous knocking noise. The engine just stops.
When they take the engine apart, you can see that every single connecting rod is bent. That engine is toast.
I’m not very familiar with smart cars, but looking at pictures online, I don’t see how you could get enough water up to where the air intake is just by driving through puddles unless one of those puddles is deep enough to just about submerge the entire engine.
My last car had bad spark plug wires, and ran like crap when it rained.
That is actually a good way to test spark plug wires. Open the hood (when it’s not raining), preferably near dusk or inside a garage where it will be easier to see, and take a spray bottle filled with water and mist up the air around the spark plug wires. If you see arcing, then the wires need to be replaced.
If your car is old enough to have a distributer, if water gets inside the distributer (common with old and cracked distributer caps) then this can also make your car run like crap or possibly not run at all.
If you’ve got water in the crankcase your oil would be gray and somewhat foamy. Better hope you don’t.
I drove my old Dodge Omni through a deep enough puddle to stop the engine once. Several years later, it blew a head gasket and when the mechanics pulled the head, they noticed that one piston didn’t come up as far in the cylinder as the others; the piston rod was bent. The only symptom noticeable was that the idle was a little rough.
Your car is designed to get splashed on. Heck, many front wheel drive cars now have their alternator toward the bottom of the engine.
Unless your intake was submerged and drew a continuous pull of water then nothing bad will happen. It’s ingesting water vapor all the time. The only way it could harm an engine would be to take in enough water to match the quench area of the compression stroke. If that happened the piston would hit a solid mass and something would break. You’d know it immediately.
It’s possible some wires “got wet” and the car runs rough for a bit. But again, it’s designed to operate in an environment that involves puddles. Here’s a video of a water test. do you think you saw more water than that?
We used to pour a cup < of water into the carburetor of a hot engine at a high high idle and that would remove carbon buildup or that is what we thought when the engine had what would be called a carbon knock. Never had any adverse issues and the knock would be gone.
And when fording a deep water flooded road it was a good idea to remove the fan and alternator belts to keep water from being carried by belts, mostly for distributor and wires.
Brakes need to be assessed after a deep water crossing and many times light application is necessary to generate heat and dry them.
When the creek along a county road i use to access my hunting shack floods i have 1/2 mile or more of deep water to navigate after bypassing the road closed signs. Fortunately that isnt every year.