Relax, you don’t actually need to educate me, and tell me Americans suffer rust and rotting vehicles as a result of salt on the roads.
However, unlike Scotland, this phenomenon is not common to the whole of the land, and only some states (mainly in the north, I think) share the rot problem.
Head south, or into California, and the problem is not salt/rust/rot, but endless sunshine which can bleach car paintwork, and is so good at causing dashboards to disintegrate that there’s a steady market in dash top covers to keep the sun off!
It’s so depressing to watch American cars being serviced, where 200,000 mile examples dating from the early 2000s can be raised on a lift and, apart from a coating of dust, can look almost as if they had driven out of the showroom only a few months ago – I think Scottish car owners probably think I’ve been indulging in too much golden nectar as I describe such a thing.
That said, I think there is a downside too, and cars that DO live in salty states develop the rust bug even faster than ours as the makers there just don’t understand the problem. I’ve also seen cars only a few years old with chassis that look like tissue paper.
I was moved to mention this not because I saw a nice clean underside that had covered a quarter of a million miles, but this truck, which looks as if the owner just runs a sanding disc over the body work to clean it up occasionally.
Imagine trying to run this truck in this condition in Scotland for a few years!
Not a rusty truck
This reminded me of a new car I tried to look after in the days when I had to be on the road for work, 52 weeks of the year.
Even though I had kept it hosed down during the winter and didn’t let the road salt lie – by the start of the third year I could already find bottom seams and edges where the rust bug was laying claim and setting up residence.
And that was with a warranty against rust in that time interval (but the conditions of such warranties are usually cleverly crafted to make sure you can’t claim, unless you’ve jumped through hoops at your expense – or at least they were back then).
Secret Scotland 