A lot of good winter driving tips. Another, touched upon in a few posts, is don’t do anything fast. Turning, braking, accelerating, decelerating, do it all gently and stay alert to the vehicle’s reaction. Doing anything fast in snow and ice is an invitation to lose control.
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Also note: with rear-wheel drive you steer INTO the skid (to get all four wheels square again and regain control), front-wheel drive you steer AWAY from the skid (the front wheel will “pull” you out of the skid).
And 4 wheel drive will help you in loose conditions, but NOT on ice. 4WD does not make you immune to ice or compacted snow, thinking otherwise is pure folly.
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Cruise control / assisted driving is not meant to be used in ANY adverse condition, including rain. A lot of people don’t know that. In fact, if you get into an accident and you have one of those things you plug into your obd2 port for cheaper insurance rates, and they find out you had cruise control on during rainy weather, they can list you as at fault from the insurance point of view. It’s one of those things I found out about talking to my auto insurance agent.
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Speaking from the Land of the Wicked Ice Storms, the A#1 biggest tip for driving in this shit is DON’T. All the above tips are good for going, there is nothing that helps with stopping. And that is the biggest issue with ice storms. You’ve seen those videos of slow motion wrecks where one car just slides into the next on city streets? They are not funny at highway speeds.
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This! The young Peas Twins are hitting 15 this spring and this is exactly how I plan to teach them winter driving. The nice thing about parking lots is you can use things like curbs, lamp posts and even lines if they’re visible to set braking/stopping goals (ie. get up to 25 mph before you pass that first lamp and try to come to a full stop without leaving your lane by the second lamp.
Another really important factor in all driving that becomes especially important in slick weather is the 2 second rule, doubled to 4 seconds for inclement weather. Always make sure that you are at least two full seconds behind the vehicle you are trailing. By far the most consistent and dangerous thing I see people do on the road is following too close. It’s the same mentality in queues that makes people breathe down my goddamn neck while waiting their turn. Back off!
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They’re trying to huddle for warmth…
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As mentioned - don’t brake on ice if you can avoid it.
Also, if you are on an icy patch and need to slow down - shift to neutral (or use the clutch if driving stick).
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And if you do, feather it, don’t mash it. Fortunately ABS is so evolved now that it really corrects for a lot of bad patterning, but there’s never a reason to brake the way that many people do in any weather.
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This is good advice for pretty much anything automated in your car. “I can shift better than an automatic transmission.” Actually you can’t! You can’t tune in radio stations with a manual dial faster than a digital tuner can, either, but for some reason nobody takes that personally.
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Huh? This is the opposite of what I’ve understood, and what the video I linked above says. (The video doesn’t actually mention front/rear wheels, but since the vast majority of 2-wheel-drive cars are front-wheel-drive, you think they’d have mentioned it.)
Just to clarify, since I talk about how this is ambiguous terminology above: if the road is turning to the left, and you are steering to the left, and you oversteer (the most common skid) such that your rear wheels lose grip and you start spinning to the left faster than you intended, the advice is normally to steer “into” the skid, which means pointing your wheels to the right and straighten back out. You are suggesting that for front-wheel drive car you should steer more to the left? I believe that will just pull you faster into a spin. Do you have any videos on this?
Edit: I think I now know what you’re talking about. It’s not so much the type of car as the type of skid. An oversteer skid (back fishtailing) is more common on a rear-wheel drive car, an understeer skid (not turning enough) is more common on a front-wheel drive car.
Given the type of skid, you should do different things: for oversteer you steer slightly back the other way pointing yourself to where you want to be going, and don’t brake. Understeer you also point slightly back the other way, to straighten them out, but it feels unintuitive because that’s the direction you’re crashing into. But you straighten out because your wheels need to grip again.
So it’s not so much that you need to know the type of car you have, it’s that you need to do slightly different things for different skids, and understeer skids are more common in front-wheel drive cars. But both types of skids can actually happen with both types of cars. Good video here.
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I learned to drive in winter in a large abandoned mall parking lot, in the snow, in a stickshift Geo Tracker with my dad. Doing donuts for hours in the snow taught me how a car reacts to snow and ice.
My first winter driving experience was in the DC area where no one does anything but panic every time it snows. I did more or less the same thing by seeing how far I could throw the back of my 95 Accord in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot. Answer: very far.
This was coincidentally also a test of how unflappable my then girlfriend was at the time. Answer: extremely unflappable. She didn’t react at all except to say a short time on “wait, you did that on purpose!?”
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Hmm. I grew up driving rwd, but have probably had fwd and awd vehicles exclusively for the past decade and a half. I can’t say which l do now as it’s all patterning, but I don’t remember behaving any differently in a fwd. I can’t think how it would matter, either as the drive of the wheels seems like it’s less critical to correcting skid than the steering is. Of course, power to the skidding wheels helps tremendously, but if you’re steering away from the skid, all you’re doing is reducing the traction patch of the tire and helping break it loose even more… I think?
ETA: It’s also worth noting that I almost exclusively drive Subarus and behave like my kids’ lives depend on it, so I rarely break free unless I’m trying to have some fun.
EETA: Yeah, I can’t find anything about steering differently in rwd, fwd or awd. The one thing I do see is a general recommendation to take your foot completely off the brake and gas in rwd vs applying a little gas in awd/fwd to help the steering wheels spin at the same rate as the skid and regain traction. Since the steering tires of a rwd vehicle are free spinning, applying the gas would only make things worse. Again, I can’t say I remember exactly what I do in these circumstances as it’s all instinct at this point.
This is a huge problem in the southern states where we get wintry weather* maybe once a year, if that, and every damn yahoo with a lifted 4 wheel drive pickup or Jeep decides that this is their moment to live large and show the rest of the world their awesomeness by racing around and then sliding into the guardrails/ditch/other cars.
*anything from an ice storm to a couple inches of snow that melt and refreeze to six flakes in a flurry
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I’d guess ‘cheaper to build’ is, depressingly, the answer.
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In vehicles that are actually the worst for winter driving. Top-heavy with a reengineered suspension (auto engineers usually know wtf they’re doing!) and the accompanying sense of imperviousness are terrible combinations for anything other than fording a stream. Even then, bravado can really bite you in the ass and make for an extremely expensive auto recovery.
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I think everyone should take their kid winter driving in a parkinglot.
You really learn how to stop and brake on ice, with nothing to hit (hopefully).
I learned how to self correct when I hit ice because of those lessons with confidence. Managing that first time on the road around others is not wise. It has kept me from otherwise crashing on several occasions.
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I used to live in the upper midwest where we had plenty of snow and nobody ever put chains on their tires. I drove a RWD car and would keep 300lbs of sand (for weight) and 50lbs of kitty litter (to spill on the ground for friction if I got stuck) in the trunk in winter.
Now I live in NYC where they put chains on the drive wheels of city buses whenever there is snow in the forecast, and I’ve long wondered whether that makes any sense. I imagine the chains damage the roads considerably, and NYC is actually pretty good about plowing in all but the heaviest snow (which happens maybe once every year or two on average), so it’s extremely rare for there to be enough snow on the ground for the chains to really dig in. Although I guess anything you can do to keep buses from fishtailing and injuring a literal busload of passengers is worthwhile?
(Aside: One super smart thing that NYC does is to put plows on the front of all the garbage trucks in snowstorms so that they don’t need nearly as large a fleet of dedicated plow vehicles.)
Random thoughts…
I unintentionally learned counter steering from playing video games. The first time I entered a really hard slide IRL, my hands and feet all knew what to do and righted the car before my conscious brain had time to even make a decision. Cool feeling!
I agree with the snowy parking lot suggestion. Go out and practice stopping, practice entering and exiting a slide.
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Not what I would advise for the automatic transmission. Immediately shifting into Neutral is better - to the same effect as disengaging the clutch with a manual. This is especially important when the car is getting down to slower speed, since the idling engine could be pushing forward when you least need that.
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… so not a real truck, then.
