How to Replace a car battery

Changing a Battery on a Full-size Ford sedan is still easy. Unfortunately, Chrysler managed to ruin this idea with a not so brilliant approach.
To change a battery on my former, yes former Chrysler 300, It required removing the Front Fender and/or Fender well.
Chrysler didn’t have enough room under the hood for a battery, so they decided to put it under the fender well, down near the road, where the road salt and mud can splash all over it. Talk about a design Destin for problems and premature failure.
So if you want to charge or test the battery, think again. Need a jump start when you are hundreds of mile from home? Sorry, call a tow truck. Of course I can’t say much else about the Chrysler 300. Its good looks are about the beginning and the end of this conversation. Oh yea, try pulling a long grade on the interstate in the hills of Pennsylvania. The motor just doesn’t want to seem to do it, and this isn’t a very big car, even though it is Chrysler’s flagship sedan.
Try again Chrysler.
What ever happened to products like the New Yorker?
They were certainly better than what you are producing now.

Chrysler must have picked up this bad habit from Mercedes as it sounds like a German design thing. Unlike my current Audi, I has 3 Audis in the eighties that had batteries under the rear seat which accomplished nothing but getting me to curse the car whenever the battery needed attention. In those days they also had other stupid electrical quirks like an electric-motor-driven engine cooling fan that came on for several minutes whenever the car was stopped which drained the battery after 10 quick stops in the city. Last but not least, these cars used Siemens power window switches with lead contacts (not even made in China) which oxidized and stopped conducting electricity. I am happy to say that this is ancient history and today's Audis are perfectly reliable except the very occasional plug coil failure. The Germans always were the best mechanical engineers but their electrical engineering skills were late in blooming.

Perhaps the 300 is better with the Hemi V8, I only had the 2.7 V6.

When you eventually learn what a battery is and does, you should make sure that any car battery you buy is a well made gel battery such as an Optima® -- they last a long time, can be mounted every which way including sideways or even upside down, and they never need water

Wallace159 THANKS,

Your timing perfect changing a car battery this weekend.

Kudos

I looked at the Optima. I also looked at a Battery with the 6-pack design. I hear it has fiberglass spiral packing as opposed to metal plates.
Here in Buffalo, if a car sits too long and the battery falls below 12.25 Volts, the electrolyte freezes, expands and bends the plates, which causes the plates to touch and short out, the battery then stats to prematurely fail as it becomes resistant to holding a charge.
On plain Lead Acid batteries, I had a lot of luck with Decka brand batteries. Interstate and Diehard didn’t do so well for me. I think DieHard went downhill when Sears changed suppliers and switched from Johnson Controls to Exide. You would think American companies would preserve names like Diehard and Craftsman. I guess the relentless pursuit of cheaper production drives everything into the tank eventually.

site doesnt work...

This page is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com