Originally Posted by Blue Bowtie
Washes can help as long as your don't drive though anything on the way back from the car wash. Coatings are critical, but won't solve everything.
Mrs. Bowtie has been daily driving a 2000 Astro AWD up to 320K+ miles through every ton of salt that the highway departments spread for almost 23 years. There is no body rust, no frame channel corrosion, and very little related problems. I've lost a few brake and fuel lines to corrosion, a few sets of stabilizer links, and some of the fasteners are showing stress. When the truck was new, the underside was cleaned, dried, and hand painted with enamel primer and a semi-gloss topcoat, including the axles, spring mounts, and anything that was not plated, painted or otherwise coated. It also gets parked in a heated garage daily. Drying out seems to have helped immensely since dry salt residue is exponentially less corrosive compared to a salt solution or vapor.
I also have an '86 Trans Am parked indoors, two Impala SS examples ('94 & '96), and a '48 John Deere M along with the mowers, snowblower, etc. As you might have guessed, no rust on any of them, and the '94 SS has been winter driven at times. My S10 half-truck gets parked outdoors, and it's a completely different story.
The cost of additional energy to heat the space to above freezing may seem frivolous, but it has saved a lot of repairs, replacements, and frustration. That Astro likely would have been replaced twice in that time span, probably at a cost of around $60K. Even it I had "stretched" the possibly rotting vehicle out to ten years, that should have been $30K to replace it once. I'm confident that I have not spent $3,000.00 a year to heat the garage. My gas bill is not that high for the entire residence. In addition to that calculation, all those "new" vehicles would have burned the same amount of fuel, used the same amount of oils, greases, tires, filters, brake linings, belts, lamps, etc. while being driven, essentially making the cost of use and maintenance the same.
In 39 years I've lived at two residences with heated garages, one detached and the current one attached. Maintaining some heat in the attached garage also reduces heat loss on the common wall, reducing the heating requirement for the house. 50°F makes a huge difference compared to -10°.
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