It is hard to keep your feet warm in a car without a heater if the outside temperature is below freezing. Your feet are resting on the floor and there’s not much between your feet and the outside. There’s a carpet, some carpet padding, and a bit of metal – and the floor cold-soaks pretty quickly once the heater is off. I carry two mylar frozen food bags – they cost a buck apiece at the dollar store – or some similar food carrier and put one foot in each (shoes included) to help keep my feet warm. Get a bag large enough for a boot so you can get in and out if it quickly. The bag provides some insulation on the bottom, but another value is the insulation it provides for your ankles. One or more of your ankles is likely near the door, and the door will cold-soak pretty quickly and star absorbing heat from your body. It’s hard to insulate your feet with blankets, but easy with insulated food bags. Keep a couple for each likely passenger.

Electrical management is important. The picture above shows a car with headlights burning – which is most often stupid. Headlights consume a lot of power, and typically are not necessary if your car isn’t running and/or drivable. We spoke in the earlier post about using blinking flashlights on the roof to attract attention – so your headlights are typically going to be gobbling your battery without providing you much benefit. You need your battery strong so you can start your car (assuming your engine isn’t broken) and so you can have cabin lighting, the radio, charge your phone, etc. Don’t spend your battery carelessly. A battery loses a lot of capacity when it gets cold so you need to be very stingy with your electrical usage.

The list above doesn’t include additional pants. It should, and they should be water-resistant at minimum and NOT made of cotton. Cotton kills in cold weather. Wet cotton loses the vast majority of it’s insulating value and takes ‘forever” to dry. You want – despite the fashion implications – synthetic fabrics for your survival clothing – underwear included. Your spare pants will help keep you warm in your auto, and help you enormously if you need to be out of the car.

Synthetic clothing can cost an arm-and-a-leg, or you can go to WalMart or Target or equivalent and outfit yourself with a long sleeve undershirt, top shirt, and trousers for about $50. Catch them when they are switching seasons – from summer to winter, for example – and you can do it for $20. You’re not looking for fashion, and your survival set doesn’t need to be especially wonderful in terms of quality. You’re not looking for something that will last for five years – you need something that will help protect you for several days. Skip the super-duper camping quality – unless you are outdoors as often as folks here in the mountains – and equip yourself for an emergency.

Strike-anywhere matches too frequently don’t. They are susceptible to moisture (humidity), a bit of a risk in a car (in the summer your car interior may get astoundingly hot), sometimes hard to strike of your are shivering, and in other ways are not a safe bet as your exclusive source of lighting candles. Have a couple of Bics – remembering that they don’t last forever – and if you are in areas like the Colorado mountains also keep a fire strike or two. Three ways to light a candle is a decent margin of safety.

Keep your matches in a match container – which can be one of those nifty tube things (buy them on the web for about a buck apiece) or on an old prescription bottle. Keep the container in a couple of nested plastic bags. Pack your matches tightly enough in their primary container that they do not vibrate against each other – your car bounces and vibrates a lot in normal operation – and you’ll find cotton balls do a nice job for that. Matches rubbing against each other have a risk – albeit small – of setting each other on fire.

The list is a little light on hats. A wool cap is a good start – anything woven that covers your skull, ears, and most of your neck in back is a necessity because that’s where your body loses most if its heat. Make sure it is NOT COTTON. I carry a baseball cap in addition to the woven hat, and wear it over the woven item to (a) keep the woven one dry if I am outside, (b) add extra warmth, and (c) provide something on which to hang a headlamp. There are times when the baseball cap is all that is needed, and that allows the woven hat to be removed. Too much clothing leads to perspiration – and that’s a bad thing. Being wet in the winter is being at risk in the winter, so you need layers you can open and close, don and doff, in order to maintain a dry body temperature. That’s especially true for hats because of the amount of heat that may be lost because of the large network of blood vessels on and near the surface of your head.

You should carry sunblock and lip balm in your winter kit. You can get “sunburn” from the glare off the snow, and the dry temperature is tough on your lips.

The list above includes toilet paper, but is missing the plastic bags that are TP’s partner. You may be able to get out of the car to go the the bathroom (or you may not be able to – depending on damage and injuries) and you need something to collect urine (a couple of empty plastic drink bottles with wide mouths are handy) and feces (the plastic bags) in order to keep the interior of your car from becoming dangerous if you cannot get out of the car. Plastic gloves – either of the medical or food handling type – are also handy in such a situation. The food handler gloves are the better choice because they are larger and much easier to put on than their medical cousins (remember, you’re going to be cold and your muscles will not be as flexible as they are normally) Food handler gloves can be pulled inside out easily as you are removing them to help with both sanitation and odors.

I carry a pack of plastic sheet – you can find it in the painting department of most discount, paint, and home stores – and good quality duct tape. You may have damage to your car – a broken window or a sprung door – from sliding off the road. The duct tape and plastic sheet (get at least 3 mill thick for this purpose) will allow you to seal such holes. The home or hardware stores typically sell contractor garbage bags – of the 3 mil or greater thickness – and they can be substituted for the plastic sheeting.

Heavy-duty trashbags – 55 gallon or larger – also make good rainwear in a pinch. Remember that you need to stay dry to stay warm, and large, solid trashbags with a small hole out through which to stick your head make good ponchos. You may be able to find “Christmas Tree bags” – some are 12′ by 5′ – that are normally used to cover discarded Christmas trees. They make very good shelters, though they are normally very thin plastic and thus need to be used in conjunction with thicker bags. You need to spend considerable attention to staying day – it’s often the difference between living and dying (or very serious injury) and plastic sheet and plastic bags of a least 3 mil thickness is a good choice for same.

Carry a three or four day supply of your prescription meds in your winter kit. Make sure each different medicine is in its own sandwich bag or prescription bottle (save your old ones for this purpose) so that they ingredients don’t migrate to each other. You’re going to be cold and under some stress if you’re stuck in your car – and there’s no reason to add to your risk by not having access to medications.

Your survival supplies priorities in a winter situation are shelter/warmth, water, and food. You will freeze to death before lack of water gets you, and lack of water will kill you before you die of hunger. Plan accordingly.

This list is grievously incomplete. “Spare blanket” is unlikely to keep you warm if the outside temperature is below 40 degrees – remember that you need to maintain a core body temperature of at least 96 degrees to stay alive. Hypothermia is generally considered 95 degrees. Will your blanket – with what you’re wearing (spare coat, etc) – keep you in the high-90′s when the outdoor temperature is around or below freezing? Unlikely. Three or four blankets, or a 10 degree sleeping bag, is more like it. You can test what you need by spending two or three hours in your car – in your driveway – on a winter’s night. Don’t use the engine – simulate a slide off the road which punctures the oil pan and thus prevents your engine from working – and measure how long your “spare blanket” keeps you warm.

Space blankets are a decent last resort, but generally pretty useless. They are noisy enough to prevent getting any sleep, and manufacturer claims to the contrary, provide little warmth in a “deep” winter situation. Space blankets don’t breathe – and thus can collect enough moisture from your breath (should you crawl under one) to actually drip. Wet clothes often lose considerable insulation value – especially cotton – and thus a space blanket may help make you colder. Space blankets make handy ponchos to keep you out of the rain and may be a usable reflector to signal rescuers, but you are likely to be disappointed at the amount of warmth they provide.

The article doesn’t mention that you need to keep your kit in the cabin – on the floor in front of the passenger seat is a good spot – in case you are too injured and/or your auto is too damaged to allow you to get out of the car to open your trunk. Keeping it in the cabin will help keep the bottles of water from freezing, and keep batteries warmer (batteries lose about 50% of their capacity if they get too cold) as well as making the kit available to you.

The flashlight is a good idea, but makes for an awkward light source for reading should your difficulty present itself at night. Nights, recall, are much longer in the winter than they are in the summer. Thus a head light – preferably one that mounts on a baseball cap (the headbands on such lights often cause headaches) and uses AAA or AA batteries instead of the very expensive “button” batteries – frees your hands and is vastly more convenient for reading than trying to hold a normal flashlight over your book. You’re going to be cold, so you want to reduce aggravations. A headlamp helps reduce aggravations.

Consider carrying a carbon monoxide detector. They cost about $20 these days, and with a set of spare batteries (not installed until your emergency) may help you prevent brain damage or death. Our scenario is that the engine won’t run so that’s not a source of carbon monoxide for this exercise, but your actual emergency may include a running engine. We are assuming candles – and they are a CO source.

The candle is a good idea, but dangerous unless you have a base for the candle. Tea lights in an empty tuna can are fairly safe, but I prefer to use “church candles” – they have their own glass container to handle the melted wax – sitting in a base made of three or more tin cans. The base helps prevent the candle from tipping over and setting the interior of the car on fire. Tin cans come in a variety of sizes, and having three – each successively smaller one nested in the next largest – can provide a very stable holder for the candle. The church candles are typically seven or eight inches high, burn well over 100 hours, and cost around $1.60 at Walmart, most supermarkets and dollar stores. Burning three or so will help keep your car cabin survivable. Test your bases in your car – make sure you know where you’re going to put the candles so you don’t have to wrestle with that decision when you are under the stress of an accident. Don’t sleep with the candles burning. Candles are a fire threat and a carbon monoxide threat and you need to manage their use carefully.

The list does not include a small mirror and a loud whistle – and it should. They will help signal rescuers should you slide off the roadway and subsequent snow and snowplow activity erases all evidence of your slide. Many LED flashlights (ditch anything with an old-style bulb – LED’s are the only way to go because of their durability and lower energy consumption) include a blinking or strobe mode which will help attract rescuers. LED’s are much less expensive than they were several years ago, and Costco, for example, sells lights of 500 lumens (which is very, very bright) that run on C batteries for $15 apiece. 200 lumens is a decent minimum brightness for your car survival kit, and I carry four. Bright LED flashlights resting on your roof, in strobe mode and aimed at oncoming traffic, attract LOTS of attention and may help prevent people from running into you. That’s why I carry at least four such lights.

Cold will diminish your ability to think and reason. The military has done extensive research on the effects of cold (there are scads of videos of same on YouTube) and the results show that cold diminishes capability – markedly. Your kit needs to support you without your having to think about what to do next.