It was too cold for ol' Butterscotch this morning. 3 degrees according to the local weather channel (I know, that's not that cold). Neither vehicle was plugged in because the parking lot is too far away. The old Benz fires up pretty easily at 18 degrees, but it was just too cold this morning. She needed more cranking time than the battery could support. Once I hooked the jumper cables to the Dodge and had unlimited battery capacity I was able to get the poor old thing to fire off. I had to cycle the glow plugs for about 3 minutes, crank for about a minute until the engine was running faster than the starter would spin, then keep holding the pedal down until the RPM started coming up. It idled on its own after a couple minutes. Plenty of white smoke.

The Dodge didn't seem to notice that it was cold. I think it lit on the 3rd compression stroke, it went "R-R-Vroom." Good thing, too - because I needed the Benz today.