Snow doesnt Kill Mileage...
 

Idiots who cant drive in it do!

Spent 1.5hrs this morning to do 25 miles getting to work. Took the backroad as the motorway was shut/jammed

The number of folk driving idiotically included

People tailgating the car in front, on packed snow- no hope of stopping.

Failing to use gears to slow the car- braking at the last minute and sliding

braking round corners, causing slides

Doing 20mph on relatively clear, straight roads (good traction/little no snow)

It always scares me how much Britiain falls apart at the first sight of Snow- Several EU/Scandanavian countries can run in snow, no problems.

Gah!

It happens everywhere. There are a lot of really bad drivers but in the winter thier numbers seem to grow.

We don't appear to do much in the way of teaching people the skills needed to drive as safe as possible on slippery roads. We never test anyones skill in foul weather driving. What few times there is snow / ice on our north Alabama roads, we can always expect a BIG story on the local news showing the best accident pictures of the day. When questioned, they almost always admit to driving as if it was a clear, sunny, August day.

Back in 1984, on a Sunday, it snowed 12 inches in 24 hours on San Antonio Texas (as in 'when Hell freezes over') (not that San Antonio is Hell........)

The next morning, there were over 400 accidents before 8am. The mayor closed the roads down.

I had a brand new WV Quantum Wolfsberg Edition. (think Audi 4000 with 5cylinder/5speed from Audi 5000) thankfully, the 60 series Conti tires where brand new.
It was my first experience with fwd. I had tons of fun!!!!!!

Even here the first snow/ice storm people forget how to drive. They drive like they have all the traction in the world and play lemmings in the ditch, then the day after and it is all cleared up and you do have all the traction in the world they go 12.5mph. It's pretty bad when a fairly dedicated hypermiler thinks you are going too slow.

I love little front wheel drive POS cars in the winter, especially with a handbrake.

hand braking puts a smile on my face every time, my wife's not so much:)

yeah, my kids love the hand brake, oddly my missus doesn't

...likewise, the southwest has similar IDJIOTS who can't drive in a "dust storm" or "sand."

I was wondering if i'd been too harsh..seems not:)

As for fwd .. It's dependable, safe and No fun!

did 1800miles in a month last winter in my bmw 320 with no traction or abs-much more like it:)

I talked to the ecolords in your behalf. They have granted you permission to exclude this tank from your vehicle log. ;)

I look forward to the start of each winter for the annual YouTube "snowy/icy road" video extravaganza!

Here's the best one so far...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhZCyQ3emQg

You'd think people in Northern climes would know that winter brings snowy, icy, slippery roads. Nope. They need the annual trip into the ditch or collision to bring it all back. You wouldn't believe all the whiners that blame slipperyness on the Dept of Transportation. They expect the road to be like it is on a clear, dry, August day, all year around. This is how we end up with oversalted roads and rotted out vehicles. :rolleyes:

Yeah, it took me 4.5 hours to drive 15 miles last Monday night (the night of the youtube clip above).

But the good news is, my snow tires don't hurt my MPG. Got a record tank on a weekend trip to Portland - 36.1. Well, more like 35, the odometer reads 3% high, but that's the same as my summer tires so I'm not counting it.

Ya'll would enjoy driving in Arkansas. the road department doesn't believe in putting down salt, and instead prefer gravel. And they only scrape the main roads, the back roads and lesser highways they only knock off all but the last inch or so, packing that last inch into a 1/4" of ice........

I would love that- I'd rather chance a dent than the certainty of total rust destruction.

I'm with Frank on that one. I'd much rather drive on slick roads and take some extra time than drive myself insane trying to keep a car from rotting.

F*** salt! F*** people who think salt will solve all their winter problems! It's weird how in a country where winter is much longer than summer you'd have so many drivers who either panic and end up on someone's bumper when they see the first snow flake, or they start to fool around and end up in a ditch. Geez, it's winter, get used to it!

We got 15-20cm of snow in 12 hours today, with at least as much forecasted for the night and tomorrow. This evening was bad. Traffic jams and drivers complaining about "not enough salt", "we pay taxes", etc. The number of cars in Warsaw increases by 5-10% each year, but the number of idjots at least doubles!

As of today you can get a 40€ fine in Germany for not having winter tires when driving in snow or freezing rain.

Hand braking in the winter kills my FE! Maybe because it freezes stuck and takes 5-15km of brake dragging to start to let go? Other Pug owners should know what I mean...

[QUOTE=320touring;206747]

As for fwd .. It's dependable, safe and No fun!

QUOTE]

how VERY dare you

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbShS...eature=related

Two things struck me in that video:

1. It seems that the bus driver (around 3:20) knew what to do when sliding (turned the front wheels into the slide),
2. Some drivers prefer to drive onto a sidewalk with pedestrians (around 2:01), rather than to hit another car. Hitting something soft won't leave a dent, hopefully.

[QUOTE=robchalmers;206792]IIRC, The real Stig (a mr Bloemqvist) took a 1600 Group N Felicia to 3rd OVERALL on the
1996 Network Q Rally of Great Britain:D

My brothers was fun in the snow- until you realised that drifting was a "power OFF"" skill, rather than a "power ONNNNN" one:rolleyes:

3. Locking the brakes WILL NOT slow you down, only let you accelerate down the hill!!!! If you lack ABS you have to be very easy on the brakes to maintain control! Using the transmission in low gear helps a lot.

I think the lack of a massively popular rally circuit in the US contributes to the ignorance of the beauty of small front wheel drive cars in loose traction. All the good rally races are outside of the US, and I can't see a good reason why, considering we have so many mountain ranges here, and dirt roads are still very common.

I suppose the popularity of going fast in basically a straight line is too deeply imbedded into the American psyche to take enjoyment out of buzzing down narrow dirt roads in a small car (which I've done---its a blast!)

1. Did you notice that bus slid down the hill... and it had chains on?
2. You are assuming there is some level of control going on there and driving onto the sidewalk is intentional. I suspect that once the slide starts, these people are in full-on panic mode and there is no rational thinking going on. The car mostly just slides where gravity/momentum takes it.

I also live near Seattle, and it was a mess out there. It literally took people 5-10 hours to drive 40 miles that day. Many people abandoned their cars on the freway because they ran out of gas, just idling along.

It snows so rarely here that few people know how to drive in it and we don't have the appropriate equipment to clear it out in a timely manner.

I drive a RWD pickup and love driving in snow. I had no problem getting around in spite of my worn out tires, but I've got a lot of experience driving in snow. My wife, on the other hand, struggled to get up a modest incline with good all season tires and nearly wrecked her FWD Vue.

I took my drivers training during mid January, that year all the roads were glare ice and in those years no salt was put down on side roads, so our drivers ed teacher had us driving on lots of side roads with lots of stop signs.

I drove for years steering lightly and braking very early summer or winter.

'tis the silly season for driving. I had my first dusting on Sunday night and Monday morning was my first time driving out of my neighborhood with snow on the roads. It was a learning experience to find that most of the road was just wet, but there were a couple shady corners that concealed black ice and bumped the pucker factor to about a 9.5. I've now taken note of the corners that get little light during the day in the winter and adjusted my morning strategy accordingly.

Regardless, the other guy is always out there, generally in something much bigger and harder to stop even if you do control your own car, so, in the infamous words from Hill
Street Blues, "Let's be careful out there".

I have to disagree with the OP: packed snow may not hurt your mileage, but loose snow certainly does. Especially when it's deeper than the belly pan of the Insight. The car has lots of good qualities, but a snowplow it is not. That said, I've been driving it around the Sierra for seven winters now, including a couple where I'd be driving over 8800 ft Carson Pass pretty much every weekend. If the road was open, I made it through with nothing worse than cold fingers from putting on the tire chains.

Here's another reasons why certain drivers waste fuel when it's snowing:
Yesterday morning my neighbor spent 20 minutes revving and spinning his wheels trying to get out of the snow in front of his house. Why? Because on the previous evening he didn't clear his parking space but just pulled in. In fact, he pulled in faster than usual, so that the car wouldn't get stuck halfway in. Then he just got out and went home.

1. Now I do! (had to go to full screen)
2. I agree that gravity (or Newtonian physics, to be precise) play the largest role when sliding, but in most cases it is still possible to change your trajectory in some small degree. In that exact case hitting the car or the sidewalk may have totally been out of the driver's control, yet most drivers, especially in panic situations, have a subconscience urge to not hit anything that is
   (a) on the road in front of them,
   (b) more or less their size or larger.
   I am by no means claiming that that driver tried to hit the pedestrian, only that the driver (if (s)he had any degree of control) intentionally tried to avoid the car in front, maybe playing less attention to her/his alternative route.

You never know driving on the side walk might have been a cunning ploy, if there was fresher fallen snow there, that can offer more grip for acclerating or deccelerating. the guy in the red mazda3 looked mcompletely unphazed by the snow, while SUV were floundering around, dying on the ass'es!!!

loving the corolla ballet!

I think you may have missed the point of my post somewhatt.

I'm not contesting that driving in (ANY) snow reduces the MPG you get- thats obvious.:D

I'm contending that incompetency on the part of other road uses is at least as big a factor in the reduction in MPG- crashes/inability to move etc all have an adverse affect on other road users.:mad:

What I'd give for the skinny tyres on your Insight:)

I learned to drive in Wisconsin in the 60s in my AH Sprite. The first snow was and remains a learning time. I live south of there now and get a lot of ice and have crowned paved roads and a lot of gravel.

My tire guy doesn't seem to want to sell me winter tires. He lives in town and sees that they are 4 season, figures that means winter, yeah right. I know that once He removes the tires from my car he resells them to someone else. For my Jetta I had to purchase the new winter tires on-line and have him mount and balance them.

One thing I have learned about the winter is that if the weather is real bad my business is not going to be doing anything and I stay at home.

[QUOTE=320touring;206875]THANK GOODNESSS for the yellow tape Human Protection Barrier at the 4:35 mark :eek: :eek: in the video!!!!!!! Had the YTHPB not been there ..........a lot of people would have been hurt :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :cool:

This might have been part of the problem :eek:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5248/...168516f2_o.jpg

OK, taking this discussion to a higher level.
When it snows, dumb drivers aren't the only ones using more fuel. Fuel is spent in great amounts by snowplows, and by people using fossil fuel powered machines to de-snow-ify instead of the good ol' shovel. Plus salt (and the environmental penalty not only of using it, but also of mining and transporting). Plus spraying chemicals onto airplanes so they don't ice up. Plus trucks that get rid of snow by transporting it from city streets to rural areas or dumping it into rivers. Plus machines that get rid of snow by melting it. Plus heated driveways and sidewalks.

You have some fair points there,

howeve, on your last point *heated pavements*, then this can be a side benefit from combined heating systems (e.g. steam heating in blocks of flats etc.)

Shovelling could work- but the rate of clearing isnt quick enough for the road use levels here

Good points Piwoslaw.

320, sadly, I don't think there are any examples of such thinking in North America anyway.

Driving in the winter is just the tip of the iceburg. I do burn plenty of energy and am not more or less eco than any other reader of this list. We are just pretenders to being eco friendly. In addition my business burns 140 dollars in direct energy costs and untold more from vendors and taxes on value added services.

If you want to be eco then don't drive or own a vehicle. Work at home doing subsistence farming. I heat my home with wood and make my own power at home with both solar and a generator. I have two residences and other properties spreading over 500 miles. I have been trying to selling the one furthest away but with the collapse of the US economy I have been unsuccessful for two years.

There are precious few examples over here too!
really just trying to build on the point that gas guzzling isnt the only solution to snow clearance..

If only a change in opinion at policy and social levels could be generated..

It's so complicated to think about at a societal level it's depressing, but taking steps on a personal level can not only feel empowering, it can prepare you to be a step ahead when the unfolding of an oil-dependent world comes to be. I've had to make some tough choices in the last year trying to find a place that would make both me and the GF happy. Everything was a compromise; proximity to services, size of the lot, commuting distances, growing season, sense of community... They all conspired against us and her desire for horse acreage and my desire to think about a world without cheap oil.

The irony is that without the longer drive(actually only five miles longer), I wouldnt have started hypermiling, I wouldn't have started telecommuting, and I wouldnt be saving myself roughly $75 a month in fuel from when I lived closer to work. Had I not bought an extremely old home, I'd be living with a moderately efficient furnace that came with a newer house rather than a state of the art new boiler and tankless system. While the 1400' in higher elevation will certainly change my growing season, I now have room for fruit and nut trees that I just didn't have the space for before.

I'm not living a perfect zero-carbon lifestyle, but I'm getting closer and my goals are both bold and attainable. I hope to be using 75% of energy produced at home in the next seven years as well as 40% of my own food. It's not independence but it's a long way from my lifestyle of just a couple years ago.

Back on topic, last night I made a very clear observation of just how much winter impacts mpg, even without idling, snow, or other drivers. I was coming up the canyon in a section I always have to use WOT for about 20 seconds or I'm forced to downshift out of 6th gear. This entire tank, at 50mph I've been showing 19.1-19.5mpg in this section. However, it's been relatively warm and I climb that stretch fairly early in the evening on my commute. Last night, same stretch, same speed, I was at 18.1-18.2mpg because the air was so cold. The engine was at 213F water temperature (the engine is really working in this section and that's pretty much the hottest it ever gets, anywhere in my drive), air intake temperature was 40F and when I got home, outside air temp was 24.8F. Guess I need to work on a warm air intake... I always figured mpg was mostly lost to cold starts and road conditions.

I think why my mileage died over the weekend (Heavy snow in my region), seeing how my intake is in the wheel arch between the inner wing and the arch liner and fed through holes in the arch liner - I found snow was packing out the arch liner effectively choking the intake, that and the wetted paper filter frooze in the housing :grrr: