Looking after your car - Extended Parking During Lockdown Things to know first: 1. All modern vehicles have some kind of battery parasitic load while parked, viz. some clock, security system, or other electronics in a low-power state. 2. Parked tyres discharge air to the surrounding atmosphere due to a natural process of diffusion. 3. Resting on the same footprint for days on end, vehicle tyres with a load on (the more than 1-ton of mass that is your vehicle) will develop flatspots. 4. A fuel pump resting in static fuel for extended periods can actually be damaged by the chemistry of the same fuel (most fuel pumps are immersed in the fuel tank) - I once paid dearly for this on my motorcycle. Therefore, my advice is: 1. Depending on the remaining lifespan of your battery, start your car every 2nd to 3rd day. If vehicle is parked in garage, open the garage doors to ventilate the noxious exhaust gases. Remember, a modern vehicle with multiple mini-computers viz. PCM/ECM, BCM, TCM and other sub-computers, can sometimes not take kindly to jump-starting. 2. If you have a portable compressor in your vehicle, pump your tyres up a bit beyond normal specification to negate air volume loss stated in 1 above on the problem statement up to the maximum pressure the tyre can be pumped to imprinted on the tyre sidewall. I'm assuming you are in a situation where you cannot lift your vehicle up on trestles. Naturally, the day lockdown is lifted, one of the first things you will do is check your tyre pressures for driving. 3. Move your vehicle about a bit, to rotate the tyre footprint. 4. Point 4 on the problem statement will automatically be taken care of by proposal 1 above here. The above does not necessarily come from any manual or book, but merely observations I have made from my rather intimate relationship with motor-cars over the years.
