Why You Can Trust CNET The genius ClimaGuard enclosure prevents flood damage to your vehicle
The affordable wrapper can be set up by one person and anchored to stop your car from floating away.
So, spoiler alert: climate change is real, and we're seeing the effects in much more dramatic ways than ever before. Take, for example, Hurricane Ida, which literally inundated the Gulf states and the eastern seaboard. Lots of flooding means lots and lots of property damage, including damage to vehicles.
Enter engineer and car-flood victim Rahel Abraham and the ClimaGuard temporary flood wrapper, which The Drive reported on Sunday. Abraham -- formerly an engineer in the energy sector -- came up with the recyclable and reusable waterproof car enclosure after her vehicle was damaged in Hurricane Harvey, which hit the Houston area in 2017. In addition to keeping her car dry, her goal was to create something that could not only prevent flood damage but that could be set up by one person and stop a vehicle from floating away.
It floats and that's a good thing.
To install a ClimaGuard, you lay it on the ground, carefully drive over it and then put the two halves of the enclosure together with the hook-and-loop seams. The clever part is that these seams are located well above the waterline of a floating vehicle, thereby preventing water from getting in.
Floating vehicle? Yeah, floating cars drifting in currents in major floods are a familiar image to anyone who watches the news. Having your car become buoyant and sail away is obviously less than ideal, but having a car that doesn't float isn't great either, since it's probably totally full of water at that point. The ClimaGuard allows the vehicle to float, but anchor points and straps allow you to tether the car so it doesn't wander off on its own.
Abraham's ClimaGuard is an elegant and straightforward solution to an increasingly worrying problem that many states are being forced to deal with on an increasingly frequent basis, and it's not something that will cost you an arm and a leg. The ClimaGuard is available in three sizes, depending on the size of your vehicle, and prices range from $399 to $479 with free shipping.
Read more: Car prices already sit at record highs, but hurricane season may make them more expensive
Correction, Sept. 22: ClimaGuard is made from polyethylene, not TPE as a previous version of this story stated.