Here me out, as whilst I’m sure my argument will be wrong, I struggle with this:
Let us focus on undercarriages: Yes, salt is extremely corrosive for cars. All those grit bits sounding like stones under the car as you drive on freshly laid stuff.
And yes, I can imagine that ‘next day’ look, when the roads are socked with wet, saline solution as the salt has done its stuff on road ice is horrendous for car’s undercarriage.
My struggle comes next: In the south West, the pattern typically is a week’s salt is laid night after night (and early afternoon sometimes with the school ‘run’ times) in a cold snap, and cars get plastered, all the horrible stuff. ‘It gets everywhere’ etc is often said.
But…the cold snap generally breaks , the temps go up, the salt stops being laid and it hammers down for days on end. Granted, it takes a bit of rain to swoosh most of the saline salt away, but it does.
My confusion is thus: surely this ‘pretty much no salty rain on roads anymore’, just normal wet roads, is going to wash away salt lying on the undercarriage? If the argument is ‘salt gets everywhere’, I’m going to take convincing that 5pm, hammering down duel carriage or rush hour traffic rain, weeks after a cold snap finished, don’t also ‘get everywhere’ too i.e the same places the salt did, and hence neutralises it?
Q: Does the prior salt get washed away from multiple ‘normal’ rain in non-salt road trips?
And is it a case that, yes, salt is hardly a car’s friend, but is rust on an undercarriage also due to it just getting wet, irrespective of salt, in the same way a house gate rusts even though a house gate don’t ‘travel’ on the road where there’s salt? i.e, the house gate just gets wet with normal rain.
Educate me.
