Why a car left for eight weeks won't start
It is almost never the engine. It is the battery, the tyres and the fuel, in that order.
Most owners who leave a car in a Dubai garage for a summer come back to a car that will not start. It is predictable, and most of it is preventable.
The battery
A modern car never fully switches off. The alarm, the keyless entry receiver, the tracker if you have one and the car's own computers all draw a small current the whole time it sits. That draw is small, but over eight weeks it is enough to flatten a healthy battery, and heat makes it worse: a battery self-discharges faster at 45 degrees than at 20.
A battery that has been deeply flattened once rarely recovers its full capacity. So the eight-week summer does not just leave you with a dead car in September — it often leaves you buying a battery in January.
The tyres
A car parked in one position for weeks rests its full weight on the same patch of each tyre. In heat, that patch takes a set, and you feel it as a vibration for the first few kilometres. Usually it works itself out. Sometimes it does not.
Tyres also lose pressure sitting still, roughly one to two psi a month, faster in heat. A car that was correctly inflated in June can be meaningfully under-inflated by August, which is its own problem when you drive it away.
The fuel and the rest
Petrol left in a tank for months starts to degrade, and a near-empty tank gives condensation room to form. Half to three-quarters full is better than nearly empty.
Brake discs surface-rust in humidity, which is normal and usually scrubs off in the first few stops. Rodents are a real problem in villa garages and like wiring and air filters.
What we do about it
Charging is the charger's job, not the engine's. An alternator is built to keep a healthy battery topped up, not to recover a flat one, and an engine left idling returns very little. So we fit a battery maintainer and leave it connected between visits. The engine is started to circulate oil and coolant, run the air conditioning and confirm the car still starts — not to charge it.
We take the battery voltage after the start and write it on the report, so you can see it holding or falling.
Tyre pressures are checked and the car is rolled forward or back within its own parking space so the tyres rest on a different part of the tread. The car is never driven on the road, and we will not take it out for a run no matter who asks.