Auto Care PSA: Car batteries and Cold Temperatures [View all]

[Best_man23]

If your car's battery is more than four years old, it may not perform in extreme cold temperatures. If you have an older battery (four years or older), you may want to consider getting it replaced, even if the car still starts normally.

If you don't know how long the battery has been in the car, look at the battery's top and sides and see if you can identify a date code. It will usually be on a sticker on top of the battery and would read something like 419, which would correspond with April 2019. If there is no sticker visible, the battery should have a stamped code on the side.

"The battery will have a strip, engraving, or heat stamp with a decipherable alphanumeric code. Typically found on the battery cover and sometimes on the battery itself, this code can be several characters long, giving the date information in the first two characters in the sequence. The first character will be a number from zero through nine that corresponds to the last digit in the year in which the battery was manufactured. For example, a five would mean 2015. The second character is a letter that refers to the month the battery was made. The letters A through L directly correspond to January through December. For example, the letter 'C' would mean March. Putting it together, "5C" indicates a manufacturing date of March 2015. These characters can be interchangeable, so "5C" and "C5" mean the same thing."

Checking the battery for the date code would also be a good time to check and if necessary, clean the battery terminals.

https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-to-tell-how-old-a-car-battery-is