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In my Jeep I run an Optima Red Top. I have seen batteries explode and do other weird things. The vehicle itself is as much a factor in battery life as the battery, operating conditions, operator, and maintenance.

I am currently doing a resto-mod on a '76 Cobra II (Looks like the one Farrah Fawcett drove in the Charlies Angles TV show). As a kid I remember that car blowing up two batteries at the same location about six months apart. I also remember it blowing up cheap batteries on a rather frequent basis. As part of my resto-mod I pulled the engine bay wiring harness out and was going over it with a fine toothed comb when I discovered why the car liked to kill batteries. The alternator and battery on located on the right side of the engine bay, the are connected by two leads that run all the way around the engine bay to about half way down the left side of the engine bay where they meet two other leads where they are all connected together with a fusible link. The link was about half burned out and had melted into some of the regulator wiring which ran in the same harness. I showed the damaged wiring to a friend who knows ford charging systems and the first thing he asked me was "How long did batteries last and how many of them exploded?"

My previous vehicle was a 1998 Ford Ranger and it would get about 3 years on a quality battery and about 6 on a cheap one. When I replaced the battery in my 1991 Suburban 4x4, which I recently sold, the old battery was 8 years old and only died after someone shorted it out trying to jump start another vehicle improperly. A good friend of mine has a 2001 Chevy 1500 with the original battery going strong.