By Chris Scott Barr
I can’t honestly count the number of times I’ve dealt with a dead car battery. Most occasions were when I was younger, since my first car didn’t make a noise if you left the light on. However, it’s something that happens to everyone at some time or another. It’s not a hard problem to fix, you can just get a jump from another car, or from one of those cool portable batteries. Either way, you’re going to have to lift the hood and hook up a pair of jumper cables.
There are some people out there who are deathly afraid of doing anything under the hood of a car. For those people, there is the Easy Quick Jumper. This works off of the same idea as a set of jumper cables, only you plug each end into the cigarette adapter of the two cars. Turn on the car with a good battery, wait 5-10 minutes and you should be set. Honestly, this would be a lot easier to store than bulky jumper cables, and quicker to get into place. If you’ve ever had a car battery die in the dead of winter, you’ll appreciate it. Just $26 gets you this handy gadget. (An extra $20 gets you a better version that eliminates the need for another car.)
I've tried to use one of these cigarette lighter jumpers before, and it sucked. The lighter has relatively thin wires going to it, and as a result, you can push much less current to the battery through it than you can with regular jumper cables. As a result, unless your battery is just BARELY dead, it takes forever to get your battery to a charge level that can start your car, and if your battery is sufficiently dead, it'll never get charged, because there's not enough current to even get the charging process started.
The cigarette lighter thing is a clever solution, but vastly inferior to real jumper cables. If you carry a cigarette lighter jumper, you should have a backup pair of cables. But heck, just carry a pair of cables and save yourself the money on the cigarette lighter thing.
I've tried to use one of these cigarette lighter jumpers before, and it sucked. The lighter has relatively thin wires going to it, and as a result, you can push much less current to the battery through it than you can with regular jumper cables. As a result, unless your battery is just BARELY dead, it takes forever to get your battery to a charge level that can start your car, and if your battery is sufficiently dead, it'll never get charged, because there's not enough current to even get the charging process started.
The cigarette lighter thing is a clever solution, but vastly inferior to real jumper cables. If you carry a cigarette lighter jumper, you should have a backup pair of cables. But heck, just carry a pair of cables and save yourself the money on the cigarette lighter thing.