I don't understand how people make such a mess of it either.Having driven in several inches of snow last year without incident (easier with 4 wheel drive admittedly) it is odd how others don't realise that in frosty and icy conditions you have to assume you have no brakes and little in the way of grip so you have to drive carefully. I was not taught this beyond my driving instructor several years ago telling me to drive like this and assume the worst grip levels.
I think also cars are advertised as being so clever that some drivers now think it doesn't matter how they drive the traction control and abs will just stop them from crashing. With all the 4 star ncap cars they also feel it probably doesn't matter as they won't hurt themselves even if they do end up in a ditch.
teabelly
|
What sorts of cars were they? RWD can be pretty scary in snow or ice so you might see the odd trashed Merc or B*W.
|
Peter - thats another thing. I agree that RWD is worse than front wheel drive where the weight of the engine over the drive wheels gives better grip.
In a bad winter about 20 years ago I picked up a hitch hiking work colleague who could not get his new BMW off his steepish drive in the snow. It took a week for him to move it.
I was driving a 100a Cherry which I bought as a runaround for £180. I was dodging RWD motors slithering and sliding everywhere.
|
My dad used to put bricks in the back of his rwd drive cars to help with grip. He also had a set of chains to stick on which helped enormously. A full tank of petrol would also help with weighting the back along with a couple of rugby players/bouncers on the rear seat if you can find them.
teabelly
|
My mum had a set of "town & country" knobbly tyres for her Merc 280CE. In November the t&c tyres would go on and the normal tyres would live in the boot. She managed to get about OK.
Hawkeye
-----------------------------
Stranger in a strange land
|
|
|
|
Perhaps we should include a compulsory skidpan test along with Motorway driving experience in the standard driving test.
What a good idea - it would need a massive investment to put the infrastructure in place though. Personally, I've done one of these courses and it was enormous fun - which is the best way to learn.
Terry
|
I'm starting to sound like an old man but here goes...
Its not just snow/ice its any adverse conditions at all. If I head out on to the M25 in June and we have a downpour I know that some idiot is going to drive in to someone else or the central reservation and I am going to get stuck in the resulting mess.
I can think of two factors:
By memory we seem to have had much colder winters 20/30 years ago. I can remember 3/4 foot snow drifts (and I was on a motorbike!). You never see that now, so maybe the younger generation (if that is who is crashing) are just not used to fluctuations in conditions and have less experience to cope with them.
Cars/motorbikes were much cruder 20/30 years ago and skill was needed to drive them and skills once learned are rarely forgotten so maybe the younger generation have never learnt such things and in an emergency situation do not have them to call on.
Or maybe I'm just talking nonsense.
|
If the horizon programme from a couple of weeks back is anything to go by, we are going to get plenty of practice at winter driving in about 10 years time......
|
|
Perhaps we should get the concils to grit and sale the roads, a DUTY for which they get paid a lot of money each year!
|
|
|
We're veering off subject so I'll just say this and go away.
Scientists drive me crazy. Its this, its this I'm telling you its this... no its that... etc, etc.
They've been banging on about global warming for decades we even have a global warming tax (climate change levy) we have promised to transform our whole economies to stop global warming (Kyoto treaty, though nobody but us takes it seriously) and now... we're heading for a new ice age...
|
It's the gobal warming that is causing the problem. It's melting the icesheets of Greenland, which in turn is introducing cold fresh water to the atlantic conveyor (the name for the full cycle of the gulf stream - the gulf stream is just the warm bit on the surface). This reduces the salinity and temperature at the northern limit of the gulf stream and sends colder and denser water back south of the equator to be warmed and sent back north again.
The speed of the conveyor has dropped by over 20% in the last 5 years and is approaching free-fall. When the conveyor slows sufficiently we are going to see one heck of a cold snap in Northern Europe. UK and Ireland will be particularly badly effected as we gain the greatest benefit from the gulf stream.
So we will have global warming for a while but this may in turn lead to Northern Europe getting a bit chilly for, ooh, lets say about 20,000 years. A fraction of a moment in the grand scheme of things, but it's going to ruin TVR's business and make Landrover very popular indeed!
In all seriousness, this could have some serious impact on motoring in the UK (understatement of the year). Imagine winter arriving with a bit more force than usual, then it never going away. The scary part was that the people interviewed felt it would happen in just that way, with no warning that 20xx year was going to be the cold one.
Brrrrrrrrr!
So when I change my Alfa in a few years I shall be looking with half an eye at estates with 4x4...... The Audi Allroad springs to mind, as does the Scooby Legacy, assuming they ever get round to fitting a diesel to it!
|
Alfa are bring out a 4x4 version of the sportwagon/156 so you'd be sorted :-)
The global warming effect seems to mean that the colder months get a lot warmer compared to the hotter months so the temperature differential might not be so different to how it is at the moment or was a couple of decades ago. I also wonder whether the predictions are right as weather is such a chaotic system and a small difference in the model to reality could give an entirely different conclusion.
Alternatively is it not time to put in lots of wind farms in the sea to drive underwater turbines to keep the gulf stream flowing? :-)
teabelly
|
|
|
No Dosh : "...When the conveyor slows sufficiently we are going to see..."
Vin: "...IF the conveyor belt stops we MIGHT see..." might be a more accurate statement.
It's along the same lines as "...if the Earth is heading for a new ice age...", or "...if the Earth is suffering from Global warming that will not rectify itself...", or "...if no-one invests in the search for oil, we'll run out by the year 2000...", or... {insert one of a hundred scares in my lifetime alone}
I agree that scientists' (or journalists') inaccuracy in the past is no guarantee that they are wrong this time, but it's worth bearing in mind.
V
|
|
But I've got snow chains and my own skis. I'm ready, dammit!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I fancy they were cruder even 10 years ago, Thommo - the AA Driving School VW Polo CL 1.3 I learnt on then had no power steering, no ABS, no traction control, no airbags, not much in the way of servo assistance on the brakes, horribly skinny tyres (145/80, IIRC) and would spin its front wheels at the slightest provocation, so I remember having to mind what I was about! No bad thing, in my view...
|
Well I think I would change the heading to " why car road tests are totally meaningless and a load of rubbish because they are not carried out in real world conditions.."
RWD cars are 100% US compared to FWD in snow IF they have lots of power.. even traction control is no good if you are on low profile tyres...
And 4x4s are no use if the rest of the raods are clogged up and jammed with 2wd cars..
Of course Jeremy Clarkson and co live in SE England where it rarely snows.. imagine 6 inches of snow around London and the M25.. talk about gridlock..
Now most drivers dash up to a junction and brake at the last minute.. not a good idea in snow...
Mind you that Nissan truck on Topgear would probably fare better than the majority of the high powered carp they seem to like...
madf
|
|
|
|
Thank you for that explanation Mr. Dosh. I apologise to the scientists...
|
A pleasure Mr Thommo.
The 156 sportwagon 4x4 mentioned by Teabelly has briefly crossed my mind, but seeing as I seem to have one of the few reliable 156s with 2wd, a 4wd one may be pushing my luck (and my bank balance).
We shall have to see....
Whatever I get, it won't be a HiLux. I can see the price of those things going through the roof in the coming months......
|
|
|
I agree with the contention that them from 'oop north' usually are able to cope better with a bit of snow and ice.They usually carry a shovel and a bit of old sack or carpet to give a grip if needed.
Never underestimate the British weather. I remember one winter when I set off in light rain from Hexham in Northumberland to drive to see friends in Alston in Cumbria.
The light rain quickly became a raging white out blizzard.By the time we reached the Cumbrian border we had strong drifting and I turned back rather than risk getting marooned.
I later heard that Alston was cut off for three days yet a few miles back down the road we were back in rain and it all seemed as though it had never happened.
I think the moral is 'take it easy and be prepared'
|
I suspect No Dosh that if we do see more frequent snow and ice then we'll adjust to cope with it better. It's because we're not used to it that people can't cope with it. They seem to manage fine in Scandiavia or over here twenty years ago.
I remember when my dad kept to sets of wheels for the mini - one set for the summer and another set equiped with winter tyres.
|
OP, they weren't talking in terms of some more snow and ice, they were talking in terms of ice floes of the Kentish coast, of the kind of conditions that would make greenland seem hospitable. Snow on the ground 365 days of the year.
It was not a pretty picture.
|
|
Well I didn't see the program but I've heard the theory before. To give an analogy though the UK lies between 50 and 60 degrees North, The same latitudes as Moscow and the south half of Canada. I wouldn't have thought that we'd end up much colder than these inland areas (although we may not warm up as much in the summer) They still drive cars there, presumably using snowchains and such.
|
The problem we will have is that a) we are surrounded by water and b) the prevailing winds will switch from South Westerly to North Easterly.
Possibly.
Still, as you mentioned, with some care and thought it's drivable. Whether it's drivable in a TVR is another matter......
|
|
I suspect No Dosh that if we do see more frequent snow and ice then we'll adjust to cope with it better. It's because we're not used to it that people can't cope with it. They seem to manage fine in Scandiavia or over here twenty years ago. I remember when my dad kept to sets of wheels for the mini - one set for the summer and another set equiped with winter tyres.
Spot on OP!
The key issue is the infrastructure and the willingness of the population to be responsiblr for their owm actions.
Heavy falls of snow are dealt with promptly and nost just the main roads but all the side roads are ploughed ready for the morning journey to work.
Gritting strategy is worked out with proper forecasting, again not just main roads and bus routes. For example when the forecast is for temperatures below the point at which salt works then simple grit is put down. Increasingly hot grit is used so that instead of lying on the surface waiting to be scattered by traffic the hot grit locally melts the ice which then refreezes and thus a sandpaper like surface is produced.
The population recognises the need and equips themselves with proper winter gear, engine & cabin heaters and so on. You just do not see the idiots driving peering through a letter box.
Finally its recognised that despite all the spiked tyres what have you its still dam' slippery out there so folks drive appropriately.
That still doesn't stop an extreme fall creating chaos as happened some years back when Army Sno-Cat tracked vehicles were pressed into the ambulance service. Also it doesn't stop an early snap creating travel problems for the southerners like in October this year in Stockholm one evening rush hour. [1]
Unfortunately should these conditions emerge in UK then I can't see the current incompetents in charge at national and local getting a grip on the situation, pun quite intentional. Equally with the current UK malaise of it's everyone elses fault bar mine, ie no personal responsibility taken for outcome of failure to plan or act in a responsible way then chaos will result.
Personally I will trundle around smugly on a full set of spikes with an eye cast weatherwards.
[1] Apologies to our London readers but the inhabitants of Stockholm like those of most capital cities are regarded as a brick short of a load by us country bumpkins, and when traffic chaos in the capital ensues you can imagine the comments.
|
|
|
|
Christmas 1982 I set off from Leeds in our year old Fiat Strada heading for Ninebanks (near Alston). The rain became a blizzard as you describe and despite the snow chains I decided that, pregnant wife on board, discretion was definitely the better part of valour and sought out a B&B in St John's Chapel.
The conversation I had with the landlady and following events were surreal but seasonal and might incur the wrath of the mods.
Hawkeye
-----------------------------
Stranger in a strange land
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Skidpan test may well be fun, but it won't serve any long-term purpose because icy conditions are rare in the UK. I spent 4 years in Canada, and there was fun every Oct/Nov when winter started and everyone tried to remember how to deal with it. By Dec things had settled down.
|
The stories of changed conditions reminds me of an incident, no no listen...
Flew in to San Francisco and picked up a hire car. Cheapo compact booked not available so given Mustang convertible auto instead RESULT!
Drove to Yosemite for a weeks stay. Fabulous put on your list to do before you die. Accomodation is on the valley floor and you drive over a mountain to get in to the valley (obviously). Arrived in mid-afternoon sunshine lovely...
Left at 04:00 to return to San Francisco, still dark and raining on the valley floor. So rain on the valley floor means... sheet ice on the mountain. Not many other vehicles around but those that were all had snow chains and were going very slow. Got too far to turn back so had to plough on at walking pace. Ice sheet roads and 1,000 feet drops off side of road. Most scary 2 hours of my life...
Learned later that when this happens during 'normal' hours there are police patrols stopping anyone stupid enough not to have snow chains fitted and the locals turn out and sell them by the side of the road, but at that time no one about.
|
When I was learning to drive last year we had a really cold snap - my driving instructor drove me to a huge, deserted car park which had frozen over. (I suspect someone was out with a hosepipe, but I digress.)
He then proceeded to give me a lesson in skid control, driving slowly and safely with no pedestrians around. It was great fun and taught me that the most important thing was to drive slowly rather than learning fancy control techniques. A police car wandered over while we were having the lesson - they just watched for a bit and went away, satisfied.
|
|
Three foot snow drifts? The teachers at my kids' school are snowed in for 3 days by a light dusting. I dread to think what would happen if they ever had to deal with anything approaching a snow drift.
|
Wow, didn't think I'd get this much comment after just a day! The cars I remember from yesterday were a Ka, a Laguna and (I think) a Pug 306. So much for FWD. Another was a Celica. But in any case, I was driving RWD in the ice this time last year and it's still perfectly possible to keep under control - just needs a little more skill & patience.
Completely agree with comments about driver training. As I was writing the original post last night, I was tempted to have a second rant about the inadequacies of the driving test - mine certainly didn't prepare me for driving in adverse conditions of any sort.
With the indulgence of the moderators -
On the wider global warming/Gulf stream issue - climate change happens all the time. It's the acceleration of this change that is a concern. But the possibility of significant changes in our weather is not necessarily the most pressing issue, even if we do end up with the same climate as Stockholm.
Not just Greenland, but more importantly Antartica are losing tremendous amounts of "permanent" ice due to melting - whether this is caused by global warming or natural causes, the ice is still melting regardless. It's significant that this ice goes from land to sea as it melts - if ice floes melt, sea levels don't change as the ice floes are already in the water. Glaciers melting is different. At this rate of melting, a significant rise in sea levels is on the way. Higher sea levels mean bye bye London, New York, Hamburg, Marseilles, etc etc etc ....
Trying to look at a broad range of evidence, on balance I think fossil fuel emissions, both industrial and from transport, have a contributory rather than causative effect on global warming, which in turn is likely to *accelerate* climate change. If this acceleration can be cut, we may be able to reduce the speed at which sea levels rise, and even keep our climate for a bit longer while we're at it. I don't think we can afford to delude ourselves that we need do nothing.
andymc
|
|
I have to agree with the BMW issue here. Traction in icy conditions has always been an issuein all the cars I've owned. Found myself using the Office Cav yesterday's icy day The five is too soft by far with all that software kicking in at various times to retard progress even further. Landie is the best by far though - if it skids into a fence or a grounded rwd its just a matter of taking a crowbar to it !
|
Perhaps Smart have the right idea with their plastic panels. Bump one of those then you can just warm it up and pop it back into shape. Scratch it and it doesn't show. Fantastic!
Huge rubbery bumpers would be great fun. Although if you get too many people bumping into each other you could get some serious ricochets going on and a trip down the high street would feel more like you were in a game of pool....
teabelly
|
Perhaps instead of predicting global warming, new (we are not out of the last one yet, just in a warm interglacial) Ice Ages etc these scientists could concentrate on getting the 5 day forecast correct (or even the next day\'s).If they can\'t get that right what chance of predicting a shift in the North Atlantic Drift? Remember that massive ozone hole over the Antarctic that was going to cause us all to fry? Healed itself in a few years didn\'t it and was apparently a natural and frequently occurring phenomenon? Predictions based on a few years\' observations instead of long term ones. Ice fairs were held on thick ice on the Thames up to the 18th Century (the \"Little Ice Age\").
Anyway, why are you worried about driving in the new ice age? After all, the world will run out of oil in the 1980s or so I was told in school in the \'60s - when, after a few cold winters (remember 1963?) i was also told that this was the beginning of a new ice age. Then along came global warming. All brought about by burning fossil fuels in cars? Oh yeah! What about the millions of open fires burning every day in third world countries? What about all that fossil fuel that powered the Industrial revolution? The methane from cattle is about 10x (or is it 100x or 1000x?)more important in putting \"greenhouse gas\" into the atmosphere than cars (but less easy to tax!).
|
Agreed, it's all junk science put together for political purposes, Kyoto being the biggest scam of all. Yesterday I read somewhere there will be some 30 trillion people on Earth by 2300, which will be unsustainable.
Last week I watched a Voice of America TV programme which comprised a panel of earnest beardies from Princeton or somewhere awash with charts showing population growth is slowing and is about to fall below the (sic) "replacement rate".
The only possible logical conclusion any sensible person can draw from all this is that science is largely bunk.
Winters in my youth were very harsh: 1947 was the big one?. You were marched to school regardless of the painful bleeding chilblains on your ears and you rode your motorbike through ice and snow (carefully) because you were expected to be at work on time and you were. As a result you learnt very quickly and often painfully the consequences of riding/driving on ice and snow (1963) without the need for a skid pan to learn it on.
|
Good book to read is the 'skeptical environmentalist' by some person with a first name of Bjorn. He used to be in either Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace but left as he got fed up with their scaremongering. He makes a lot of good points about the inaccuracies in data presented and that the state of the world is nowhere near as bad and that the global warming predictions are largely too high. He mentioned that kyoto would delay the warming by less than a decade and questioned whether it was economically sensible giving comparing the cost of change vs the cost of the climate change.
I think he does discuss the environmental impact of cars/lorries and how they compare to industry (tenuous motoring link :-) )
teabelly
|
I was brought up in Northern Scotland: 6foot drifts were normal.
Best winter car: Austin A30 with winter tyres on rear which I owned as student..(could not afford Mini)
No power, narrow wheels, but quite heavy so cut through loose snow..
Worst? Rover 75: no traction on polished snow.. could not get out of Aberdeen one day:-(
Worst moment? On dual carriageway going North outside Stonehaven and going up hill whilst Mini coming down spun and did 360 degree turn in front of me .. missed me by 10 feet.
Triumph 2.5PI.. surprsingly good if you drove with one set of wheels on kerb!
Then later all Ford Granadas in snow: hopeless no traction. BMW 5 series: useless no traction. Rover 800 surprisingly good provided you kept going..(fwd of course)
Jaguar XJ6/Mercedes 260E.. horrrrrrrribbbbllle in snow
BMW 318i: could not handle 2inches snow that wife\'s Peugeot 106 Diesel handled with aplomb..(spun the BMW at 10mph on wrong camber bend on sideroad)
Audi A4.. quite composed.
Would not have another RWD car.. for the criminally insane in snow..
madf
|
"Would not have another RWD car.. for the criminally insane in snow.."
If you're a two car family, it's good if at least one is FWD. However it doesn't snow *that* often.
|
I wrote a dissertation on global warming a few years ago and was surprised myself to discover that the significance of vehicle emmissions was so small it can hardly be measured. The biggest offender, by a mile, is the cement/concrete industry. It crushes billions of tonnes of limestone worldwide which emits massive amounts of greenhouse gas. The second biggest are buildings of all types.
Did you know that 97.5% of greenhouse gas emmissions are natural and only 2.5% anthropomorphic.
|
Apologies for going almost totally off topic, but......
If we took the cost of applying the requirements of the Kyoto protocol to the developed world and diverted it to other uses we could ensure that the entire population of the world had;
clean water
sanitation
education
health care
access to contraception
and more.....
need I go on?
And yet the private car is vilified as the cause of all evil?
rant over.
|
I've got nightmarish memories of last January when in the South we had sudden ice on the roads with a sprinkling of snow. It was the first time in snow with the auto Omega (rwd) and it was absolutely hopeless.
No forward traction plus the ABS made it virtually impossible to stop. As the M25 was choked I tried some of the villages to the north as a cut through - nearly never made it up some of the hills round there. Loads of FWD cars zooming past me (although I doubt their stopping power was any better).
Still, I'm grateful it only took me 8 hours to do 50 miles...that was when some people were stuck on the M11 for 18 hours or so.
I'm struggling to think of any benefits to rwd (I don't intentionally go for the power oversteer these days on the daily commute). Just hope I can change to fwd before we get snow and ice again.
Paul
|
|
The problem being No Dosh that you have to drive in the snow to the shop to get your snow chains :) I doubt many people here own a set and we have a very high calibre of driver of posting on these boards
|
I don't think RWD is bad in snow, provided you're prepared: Many bags of cement in the boot, for example.
The problems arise when the snow starts to fall whilst you're still at work, with an empty-booted car in the car park. My suggestion then is to collect up some STOUT colleagues, or people who've already abandoned their cars and set out on foot, and give them a lift while they sit in the boot.
I remember a schoolmate's mum's Renault 4 (FWD) once struggling to make any progress at all up a snowy hill trying to get four of us home. In the end the stoutest lad got out and sat on the bonnet. Sorted: Up we went.
Another snowy day years later and the few of us that had made it in, got sent home from work at lunchtime. My parents' house was at the top of a moderately steep cul-de-sac. I spent the whole afternoon's hours in repeated attempts to get my Fiat Strada (FWD) a little bit further up the road before having to turn around and retry. Never did quite make it even to the bottom of their 1 in 4 driveway. At teatime my dad appeared, back from work, and on his one straightforward, laughably easy approach, sailed up the whole cul-de-sac AND the 1 in 4 drive as though they were utterly bone dry. His car? A Skoda Estelle.
Strikes me it's all about weight-transference. RWD with a ruddy great load in the boot will go up snowy hills better than a FWD. You might have to go downhill backwards for maximum control though.
|
|
I think much of the problem in snow is the number of cars nowadays with very wide tyres. They provide great grip in the dry, but when it is necessary to have pressure on the road in the case of snow and ice to cut through, they just skate over the top. Maybe this is why people are finding BMWs etc difficult in snow (other than the obvious RWD problem)
|
Hawsey said:"I think much of the problem in snow is the number of cars nowadays with very wide tyres.."
Yes how true.. on raw unflattened snow.
On polished snow and ice it is grip that is important and here tread pattern/weight distribution and general road to tyre friction have a major impact. hard rubber compounds do not help especially on high performance cars and tyres which grip best when warm..
Hnece my comments on road testers and real world situations...
madf
|
Teabelly,
"Huge rubbery bumpers would be great fun. Although if you get too many people bumping into each other you could get some serious ricochets going on and a trip down the high street would feel more like you were in a game of pool....
teabelly"
What an image - I love it!
Matt35.
|
|
|
|
|
