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Those heat variations are obvious (even inside the glove compartment). Which I understand would mean that this would or could accelerate deterioration? Particularly since my car is parked outside year in, year out. Not the case here, amazingly, though. BTW, my "real" CDs (that are fodder for my car player) haven't deteriorated either. But I would not have been surprised if the already existing degradation on that CD-R had continued inside the car. 

Word. My daughters managed to find every way to sabotage my day from my morning coffee, right up to my nightcap! Can't believe they both have high school diplomas and are in college.  PS: After 25 years, I found a replacement copy of Blues in Trinity. They both still have no idea who Dizzy Reece is. 

Interiors of cars can experience heat extremes which sort of increase entropy with regard to plastic objects.

Getting back to the problem of MUSIC CDs that have become (almost) unplayable due to background noise and distortion:  If I had to figure out an IMAGE of what I guess the damage to the sonic reprodcution of those "unplayable" CDs is like it would be close to the image above. Like I said earlier, the distortion is hard to describe, it is a more or less crunching distortion that does seem to be linked to the actual music. I.e. the distortion patterns follow those of the music (that you still can hear, but in a bad way). And the strange thing is that while I do have the distinct impression that the dud CD-Rs from that recent haul I made were corrupted by problems with the glued-on label that had become detached partially and caused imbalance, the distorted noise that overlays the music sounds very much like that on CD-Rs I burnt (or had received) many years ago and assumed they had failed due to age. But these CDs never had any glued-on labels that may have become detached and cause imbalance. Just to check I went outside to my car and retrieved one of these "failing" CD-Rs. I had burnt it a good 20 years ago, found it had started to show increasing distortion (on the last few tracks) about 10 years ago, bought a new "real" CD of it for my collection and relegated the CD-R (that I'd figured was on its way out) to a corner in my car glove box so I'd be able to listen to what remained listenable on it (it's goodtime music that you can enjoy while driving for as long as the sound is OK). I had not listened to it in years, though, but spun it again now and to my amazement found that the distortion still is as it was back then: degradation starts at track 23 out of 27, increases and tracks 26 and 27 are virtually unlistenable. But no further deterioration during those pas 10 years! Odd ... But what I think I've learnt from the above discussion here is that those dud CD-Rs that arbitrarily jump, splutter and skip and then resume and/or stop altogether and on next try might not start up again at all (at least not on every CD player) are likely to be afflicted by a different kind of deterioration of the data. Isn't it?