Several weeks ago the “needs windshield washer fluid” light came on in my car. Since there was no urgency I had been ignoring it. But at some point I passed by a display of wintertime washer fluid in the front of the grocery store and I was pleased to be able to buy some without having to run a separate errand to who-knows-where to buy auto parts. I certainly didn’t recognize the name of what I needed (Scheibenklar Frostschutz) but the picture showed a windshield so I was pretty sure I had the right product.
I took it out to the car and looked for the hood release. I looked all over the driver side door, the foot space and the dashboard but couldn’t find a way to release the hood. So I just left the bottle in the car so that it would remind me that another time, when I had more time, I needed to get out the car’s manual. In the meantime I warned the kids to not mistake this for a water bottle and take a drink!
Another week or so passed before I decided this was the day to pore over the Volkswagen Touran car manual written only in German. I started in the front of the book where there were pictures of the interior of the car and everything was labeled, but I didn’t see anything in the pictures that had a label that sounded like what I needed. Next I consulted the table of contents. I’m not sure what I was looking for, just hoping something would jump out at me as the correct section. Bingo - Motoraum. That sounds like “motor”, right? I flipped to the Motoraum section and was very pleased to find that at the beginning of the section was a description of how to access the motoraum, i.e. it showed how to release the hood. It turns out there is kind of an obscure lever thing in the driver foot space that looks different from what I was expecting and is camouflaged to the color of the car’s interior. A pull of the lever, a press of the hood release under the VW ornament and I was in.
Step 2: Where to put the washer fluid? I looked around for something obvious and didn’t find it. It looked like there were only 2 fluid containers and one seemed to be for antifreeze, so probably the other was for washer fluid. But I needed to be sure before I poured a bunch of liquid into the car! So I got the manual out again. This time the answer was a little harder to find. I looked up windshield wipers in the index but the section on wipers only explained how to use the features of delay, high/low, etc. I scanned the table of contents again. Maybe the Motoraum section? No, I didn’t see it there. Finally I found a few lines about it in the “Cleaning your car” section, which had a crucial picture of the washer fluid tank. Perfect, now I was sure.
I unscrewed the bottle cap and poured the fluid into the tank. Done. Good job. Task completed… right? Hmmmm. I had poured the whole bottle in and there still seemed to be a whole lot of space in the tank. Doubt came over me once again. Did I do it wrong? I looked more closely at the bottle and saw a word I hadn’t noticed before - “Konzentrat”. Oh, am I supposed to dilute this stuff? I turned the bottle around and attempted to read it. There were no instructions, but there was a table labeled “Mischtabelle”. Google translate helped me to understand that this was the mixing table, and it showed the temperature at which the solution would freeze depending on how much water was mixed in. Aha! I settled on diluting the fluid with 2 bottles of water, which I fetched from the kitchen. I replaced the hood, put the manual back in the glove compartment and then tried to decide whether I should feel very pleased with myself for figuring that all out, or ridiculous for spending a half hour or more filling up my washer fluid!
The “oil change” light has come on recently…there’s nothing like Jiffy Lube here so my next auto-related job is to figure out how to get the oil changed!
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