Car batteries last for years, but every car battery shows signs that it needs replacing or a jump start. It has happened to all of us. We’ve been at the grocery store, packed up our car, and then we try to turn on the ignition. All we hear is sputtering, and we need to properly jump start our battery. It’s a fairly simple process of attaching jumper cables from the good battery to the dead one, but there is something incredibly important that you need to make sure you get right: the positive needs to be linked to the positive along with the negative to the negative. Otherwise, you won’t be able to start the car or, at worst, cause an electrical short circuit that could do serious damage.

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Whether they be the worst or the best car battery brands, these companies have made distinguishing the two pretty easy by color coating them. The positive on a car battery is typically given a red color, while the negative is black. These could be the actual poles themselves or an indicator around the poles. For the most part, these colors will be able to guide you, but there are some batteries where the colors have worn away over time. There are also some that just don’t do the color coating for whatever reason. If that is the case, there are other ways to determine the positive and negative too to keep you and your vehicle safe.

[Featured image by TaurusEmerald via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]

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There are a few other indicators that a car battery will have to easily distinguish the positive and negative for you. The most blatant of these is with plus and minus signs, just as you would see on your average, everyday AA battery. These indicators may be directly on the pole or right next to it. Just as with the color coating, wear and tear with time — along with maybe not taking proper care of your battery — could also cause these plus and minus sign indicators to wither away. If that happens, you are out of luck with visuals to make your determination on which is which.

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However, you are not out of luck yet. You can still use another sense to find the positive and negative: touch. For this, you obviously need your car to be completely off, which it should be if you need to work on the battery in any respect. All you need to do is touch each of the two poles on the battery. Whichever one is thicker is the positive one. This sounds unsafe because of scenes from movies, but a 12V car battery has barely enough amperage to shock you, let alone electrocute you. Of course, not every single car battery uses this pole design, whether it be bolts or L-shaped poles. If you have no colors, no visual indicators, and no way to feel a difference, then your best option is to consult your owner’s manual for help. Chances are good that you can tell by the colors, but if not, there’s always a backup.

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[Featured image by Rainer Kamenz via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]