When a jumpstart goes wrong? Safety Question

Neighbor tried jumping my wife’s ‘06 Nissan Altima, we left it for 10 minutes and came back and the cables had melted through the headlight of both cars and some of the bumper. I wasn’t there but thankfully they stopped their car and were able to disconnect the cables without incident. We noticed after there had been mice living in around her engine from the mouse poop, minimum the last two weeks. What causes jumper cables to do this? Something a rodent may have chewed? Definitely an issue with my wife’s car. Our poor neighbors have a newish midsized suv. My wife has also had constant issues starting her car, even with a new battery I got a year or two ago. Anyone seen this before?

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u/[deleted] Dec 31 '23

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u/jhwalk09 Dec 31 '23

Hey, can you attach an image of what kind of things to clamp the negative on to get grounded? I know they’re everywhere but I just want it to be super clear for myself and my wife

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u/NoDingDriver Dec 31 '23

If you’re not mechanically minded and don’t know how to recognise what is a good ground in the engine bay, then there’s something much better to do.

Instead of risking an unsuitable ground, take the temporary towing eye out of your car’s tool kit, screw it into the front mounting point and clamp the negative to that instead. This is a perfect ground to use and there’s no way of mixing it up with anything else that may damage one of the cars involved.

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u/jhwalk09 Dec 31 '23

My wife just said our neighbor did not turn the car off when she connected the cables, her husband claimed she was better at it than he was… would not turning the car off also cause this?

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u/NoDingDriver Dec 31 '23

I’ve never seen jumper cables melt like this before, but leaving the car running shouldn’t lead to this happening.

Safe assumption is there was too much electrical load through the cables. Either the car used for jump starting has a battery with much higher Amps than what the jumper leads were designed for or the leads were connected poorly creating a short circuit which kept heating the cables until they melted.