3 tips to protect your car on rainy and stormy days.

During rainy and stormy days, in addition to ensuring people's safety, protecting property, especially valuable assets like cars, is also crucial and needs to be considered. In Vietnam, besides the dangers from thunderstorms and tornadoes, stormy days often bring heavy rain, causing localized flooding in many areas. This is a threat and can be considered a "nightmare" for many car owners, as their vehicles are always at risk of hydrolock.

So how can you protect or minimize damage to your beloved car during the rainy and stormy season? Here are three things car owners should remember.

Arrange a safe "storm shelter" for your vehicle.

First, as mentioned, the biggest threat to cars during the rainy season is flooding. If your car unfortunately gets caught in a flooded area, it will encounter many problems. The most serious is hydrolock, which can cause significant damage to the vehicle.

Therefore, to protect their beloved vehicles, the most important thing for car owners to do before rain and storms arrive is to find a safe place for their cars. This includes avoiding low-lying areas, apartment building basements with inadequate drainage, areas near rivers or lakes, or roads that are frequently flooded.

It is necessary to park the vehicle in a safe location before the storm hits.

Besides areas prone to flooding, to keep cars "safe" during rainy and stormy days, car owners should also avoid parking in places that pose potential hazards. These include locations under large trees, construction sites, etc. This is because strong winds and storms can easily cause trees to fall, or construction materials to be blown away or collapse onto the car, causing unintended damage.

In addition, when parking, be careful to avoid areas with weak soil or manhole covers. These areas are prone to subsidence, posing a risk to your vehicle.

Drive carefully

In unavoidable circumstances where driving is necessary during rain or storms, drivers need to exercise extreme caution to minimize risks to themselves and protect their vehicles. First and foremost, they should avoid driving through flooded areas or roads. At the very least, drivers should be aware of their vehicle's wading capability and only drive through areas where the water level is no higher than half the height of the wheels.

Driving through flooded areas requires extreme caution and a constant awareness of the risk of water damage to the engine.

Furthermore, when driving through flooded areas, drivers must carefully observe the vehicles ahead to determine the water level and calculate whether their vehicle is capable of passing through. To ensure safety and ease of movement through flooded roads, it is advisable to shift to a low gear and maintain high engine RPM, while also maintaining a stable speed to prevent water from entering the exhaust pipe and causing the engine to stall.

Don't tamper with it; try to fix your car yourself if it gets flooded.

If your car unfortunately gets submerged in water and stalls, drivers should absolutely not restart it immediately. This is because doing so can easily lead to the risk of hydrolock, causing the connecting rods to bend, or even worse, cracking the engine block, resulting in very expensive repairs.

In this situation, the driver should turn off the engine, try to push the car to a higher location, or if possible, raise the car's chassis, and immediately call for roadside assistance.