Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Weather alone does very little. Weather + road ware makes things dramatically worse much faster. You can see this effect with private driveways in the north vs public roads in the south assuming similar construction.

View on HN

As someone who migrated to upstate new york from Florida, I disagree. People here are constantly repaving, repairing, and resurfacing their driveways and sidewalks. While you need an initialization crack, that can come from a host of issues other than heavy vehicles including thermal cycling and initial defects. I will note that the asphalt and concrete construction may be different in the south vs. the north, but there is much much more driveway repair up here than there was in Florida.

As a pedantic side note, this is why your batteries die, the copper leads begins to fatigue and fracture due to stresses from thermal cycling.

Copper? I thought batteries were primarily lead.

No, the batteries "die" because cold weather requires more energy to start the car and batteries are far less effective when cold. (Physically they die either from grid corrosion increasing resistance so they can't provide enough current to start or the plates shedding active material to the point where they can't hold enough charge). There is normally not any copper in a standard car starter battery.

Northern roads are often (but not always) designed with more substantial shoulders to mitigate frost heaving on the edges of the road bed and plow damage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com