Random Story – My smoking car

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Years ago, I had an almost thirty-minute commute from where I lived to where I worked.  Fortunately, there was a freeway that ran almost the entire way.  Unfortunately, thousands of other people also drove on it, which lead to traffic jams every morning and evening.  When I first started that job, my car was kinda old, and liked to overheat, especially if it wasn’t moving and getting some air flow.  Because of that, and because who likes sitting in traffic jams, I found alternate routes to work and home, which was pretty easy because there were highways and smaller roads that ran pretty much parallel to the freeway.  I took one route to work in the morning, and a different one home.  The route I took in the morning started with me getting on the freeway, but then getting off just before the spot the traffic jams started.  I then took a highway until it rejoined the freeway at a spot after where the traffic jams usually cleared up.  Not long after I started this job, I got a new car.  It didn’t have the overheating problem, but I still didn’t care to sit in traffic, so I continued following these routes. 

One rainy morning, a couple of months after getting my new car, I was going to work and I took the exit off the freeway and stopped at a red light.  I sat there for twenty seconds or so, when I saw a wisp of what looked like smoke coming up from my hood.  I was freaked out by this, but then the light turned green and there were plenty of cars behind me, so I had to go.  But I stopped at a little strip mall maybe a quarter of a mile down the road and popped my hood.  I’m not a car guy, but I figured I would be able to spot a fire, but I didn’t see anything, not even smoke.  So the rest of the drive to work was a bit nerve racking, and every time I hit a red light, I’d strain to see if there was any smoke, but I didn’t see any more.

About a week later, the same thing happened at the same spot, and I again checked but didn’t see anything wrong.  This happened three or four times over a month, with me eventually not even stopping to check if anything was wrong. 

I don’t know how much time I spent thinking about all this on my drives to work, but I eventually noticed that this only happened when there were two conditions.  First, it either had to be raining, or a very dewy morning.  And second, it only happened at this one stop light.  If it was raining, but I hit a green light coming off the freeway, but then stopped at the next red light a bit down the road, there wasn’t any “smoke.” I eventually hypothesized, that on rainy or dewy mornings, some water droplets would condense on the underside of my hood.  The five or so minutes of driving on the freeway was enough to heat the engine up that when I braked at this red light – with the exit ramp slopped slightly downward – these drops would break off, fall on the hot engine, and evaporate into steam which I mistook for smoke.  These droplets probably fell on the engine at several points, but I was usually driving and the airflow dispersed them before I could see them.  Any stops I made before this point, my engine probably wasn’t hot enough yet, and any stops after that point, all the water droplets had probably already fallen.  It was only this very narrow bit of coincidences that led me to think my car was on fire.