Will you read a post about car mechanicals? DOUBTFUL.
A few weeks ago, the alternator died on a car I was driving while about 70 miles from home, collecting some parts for my car. This was an interesting experience. Initially, the headlights ran bright for a few seconds – the voltage regulator on the alternator had failed, so it was providing excess power. Then the whole unit gave up, triggering a few warning lights and telling me I had probably less than an hour to get wherever I wanted to go before the car died completely.
The thing to do in this situation is to turn off everything electrical that you can – radio, air con – and peg it to a safe harbour nearby. Sadly, night time driving without headlights is frowned upon, so the efficiencies you can make are sometimes limited.
The first thing to fail was the odometer display (mileage counter). Then, the speedometer and tachometer (rev counter). Within a few minutes the indicators stopped working, and almost straight after that the engine gave up. A fading battery is a strange and clumsy death for a car, with near-essential systems failing straight away and irrelevancies like the electric windows quite happy to power up and down long after the car’s rumbled to a sombre halt.