Say you store a vehicle outside all winter, if there was an usually cold week, say -20 degrees Fahrenheit for example, is it possible for the car to be colder than the -20 since it sat weeks prior to the -20 temps?
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To put it simply, theoretically yes, an object can get colder (or warmer) than the ambient temperature.
Temperature is a macroscopic property, meaning that it measures the “excitation” (aka the velocities of each particle in a macroscopic way) of particles in a thermodynamic system. More temperature means more excited particles. Particles can get more excited through collitions between themselves. If you put together a cold object and a warm one, yes, theoretically the colder could get even colder and the warmer could get even warmer (though the average temperature will remain since temperature is directly related to the energy of the system in an 0-energy loss environment).
But why does it never happen??? That is where statistics come in. In a system of 1 gram of water there are 0.33 times 10 to the 24th power (or something like that) particles of water. So if you put a single gram of water heated up to 20 degrees next to a single gram of water heated up to 2 degrees, yes, it could be that the temperature of the warmer could get to 30 degrees so long as the temperature of the cold one drops to -8 degrees. But it doesn’t happen because it’s more likely that when two mollecules of water collide, the faster one imprints some of it’s velocity to the slower one. This usually depends on factors like the angle of collition, the direction, the geometry of the mollecules, and a very large set of variables.
Now say that only one in one thousand collitions actually works how we desire, this is, the faster mollecule gets faster and the slower one could get even slower. Now take into consideration the trillions of mollecules in the system and the amount of collitions… Statistically it is impossible that the warmer one could get even warmer. Simply, the odds are not in their favour. That is a very important concept in physics: systems don’t tend to order, but to the statistically most likely state, and that is what enthropy really is. So, when two different temperature objects are next to each other, the most likely state is that they average their temperature. Of course, like I mentioned previously, this does depend on many factors, and we could find materials that “defy” that natural law, but in reality, they are just obeying the laws of thermodynamics.
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