"SAAB. The Swedish, come Chinese, car made for Halifax winters" more like?
We just had a series of freezing rain days without me using the car. Closer to Halifax, Nova Scotia than Halifax, UK, I recon. Getting at the windows for a while I eventually had to give in and just sit in the car with the engine running for a lot more than 2-3 minutes.
I don't miss 'em ...
Few years back, I lived a mere handful of miles away but practically double the altitude. We got winters! We got winters that nobody else did. Our community website was humorously called 'It Snows Up Here in June" ... and it did (summer cricket match snowed off!). There were three years running where the snow that dropped at the end of October wasn't gone 'til the following April and certainly two years where the daytime temperature didn't rise above -5. I recall going out on Christmas Day, over the back up to the ridge with a thermometer and getting an out of the wind temperature of -17. That was a VERY cold winter. There were two together, three really although one was just a bad winter.
Back then I drove a "classic" SAAB 900. Mrs did, too. We were never stuck, although we generally didn't lock the cars as the locks would freeze up (yes, impromptu bag of piss held against the lock got me in once). Leather interior, stiff as a board! Always fired up. Those heavily curved windscreens really did need a damn good scraping.
I now drive (have done for the last 8 or more years) a MY2000 SAAB 9-5 Aero. Lovely car. Handbrake freezes on in winter - ironic, as it's a drum mechanism inside the hub, designed that way for Scandiwinters to prevent the handbrake from freezing on, so I leave it off if the temperature threatens to drop under zero. That's the car I can jump in, fire up and let the blowers do their thing ... seriously, the hot comes through so quickly