What a sucky day. I know the dead battery all too well. Not fun. What I'm going to guess happened (and what happened to me) is that one of the cells in the battery went bad. Say it's a 12V battery with 4 cells. Your car needs to see 9V from the battery to do anything. Well, over time you can no longer charge each cell to it's full 3V meaning that your battery with one bad cell was likely putting out around 7-8V meaning car no do nothing.
After I had one car incident, I put the roadside assistance number into my cell so I wouldn't have to try to look it up.
As to why you couldn't get it jumped from your friend's car, was the car running at the time? And if it was, did they give it some gas to so that it wasn't just idling? And it also depends on whether their car was smaller than yours. I know some little 4 cylinder engine car could never jump one of our big ol' 8 cylinder engines. Heck, my car has 2 batteries in it because the Hemi engine is a power hog on start up. Thankfully the one time J ran down my little Sebring, it was the Sebring and I knew the truck could jump it (after I had to park the truck on the grass because the batteries were on opposite sides and the cables not quite that long). If it was the truck that was dead, I'm not sure the Sebring alternator would put out enough juice to get the truck going.
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Date: 2008-09-19 12:14 pm (UTC)After I had one car incident, I put the roadside assistance number into my cell so I wouldn't have to try to look it up.
As to why you couldn't get it jumped from your friend's car, was the car running at the time? And if it was, did they give it some gas to so that it wasn't just idling? And it also depends on whether their car was smaller than yours. I know some little 4 cylinder engine car could never jump one of our big ol' 8 cylinder engines. Heck, my car has 2 batteries in it because the Hemi engine is a power hog on start up. Thankfully the one time J ran down my little Sebring, it was the Sebring and I knew the truck could jump it (after I had to park the truck on the grass because the batteries were on opposite sides and the cables not quite that long). If it was the truck that was dead, I'm not sure the Sebring alternator would put out enough juice to get the truck going.