The only thing even close to heat, when I was driving my brother's, was on the
back window (over the engine). It seemed to thaw. Sometimes. When we drove,
one hand was on the wheel and one on the stick, with an ice scraper laced
between the fingers. Between shifts, one scraped ice. ...off the *inside* of
the window.
At my grandparent's house that's how we slept. The whole upstairs had no
heating devices, no stoves, nada. So in the winter you'd see a thick
sheet of ice growing on the inside of the windows. This is why people
wore knitted hats at night, else your ears could probably freeze off.
In the mornings one had to brave the cold and walk downstairs to stoke
up the coal stove, climb back up and into bed, and hope the dang thing
won't explode
I also remember the battery freezing, so we'd have to take it in every night.
I fixed that for him, though. Someone rear-ended me on I94 and totaled the
bug. My brother got about twice what he paid for it a couple of months
before, so he wasn't upset at all. ;-)
My Citroen 2CV was worse WRT heating. It had a large canvas roof which
has the R-value of a Kleenex sheet. The engine had only 16 horsies and
no real heat exchangers like the bugs did. The air was just sort of
channeled along the cylinder head fins and guided inside. Some of it
actually arrived inside. Luckily you could drive it with army boots. The
battery was a non-issue for me, I simply drove without one for years
because as a student a rare 6V battery was totally out of budget. This
was good training for the biceps muscles. Get crank out of the trunk,
stick it in, and have at it. Phutah .. phutah .. poof .. phutah ...
*BANG* ... vroooom. Accompanied by some black soot and rust crumbs
flying out the exhaust, with gusto.
