We got some snow today, maybe eight inches or so. The temperature has been at 34ºF for a couple of hours, so I thought I’d run an errand. ‘Thought’ being the operative word. I cleaned the snow off of the Prius, and managed to get it out of the driveway and rolling down the street. It was a bit slippery, but OK. About three miles down the road I accepted that maybe it wasn’t entirely safe to drive this car in these conditions.
Now, I could attempt to make a U-turn on the main road. That would have upset some people, so I turned onto a side road. I knew if I attempted to hang a yoo-ey I’d get stuck; so I went a couple of miles to the next intersection and added another 90º to the left. Things were OK, but slippery, until I got to a curve in the road. The car wanted to go straight. But I wouldn’t let it. Eventually I came to the next intersection and was at 270º. May as well go to the corner market.
I took the beach road home so that I could drive straight behind the SO’s truck. I turned onto my street and made it halfway up. See, the Prius has traction control. If a wheel starts to slip, it stops getting power. Neat, yeah? Except when both wheels slip, the car doesn’t go. I put it into reverse and went back to the market, and then up the shallower, cleaner hill and went home the way I went out. Now I’d have to make a U-turn to get behind the truck so that I could pull the Jeep out of the driveway. Oops. There’s snow in that gravel! Car no go. I had to get a shovel and dig out a couple of tracks. That done, I was able to pull out and make a 270 to get back into the driveway. I’m hoping that the (expected) rain will clear away the snow, or that I can pull the Prius straight out enough for the SO to get the Jeep out tomorrow.
One of these days I’ll get some chains for the Prius.
My Pathfinder has that ‘feature’ - Traction control. Luckily I can turn it off when it hurts more than helps.
I’ve got a new snow machine. A 2004 Ram shortbed regular cab. It’s a hard to find truck. I put a new Western plow on it and a 10,000lb Warn winch on the back. New rubber all around and chains for all four corners. Extra back up lights for plowing. Let it snow.
We had our day of snow. The low temperature was 33ºF, and they’ll be in the mid-to-upper-30s (41ºF expected tomorrow night) for the next 10 days. So no worries driving the Prius.
This is a stupid feature found on some other cars. One wonders what the mindset was of the engineers who decided that the solution to lack of traction in snow was cutting off power to the wheels.
My car has a button to turn off the “traction control”. Unfortunately you must press it every single time you start up the car in snowy/icy conditions.
I think the idea is that for nearly all driving situations, only one wheel is going to slip; as on hitting a puddle of water or perhaps a patch of ice. This makes the car safer. The [del]lawyers[/del] engineers probably figured that if the car needed to be driven in snow, the driver will have installed chains or snow tires. The added safety outweighs a benefit that few people will use.
There’s a ‘hack’ to turn off the traction control in the Prius, which is in a thread I started in 2010:
I have snow tires which work well if there isn’t a major snowstorm.
I think whatever safety is added by “traction control” systems like the one described here, is far outweighed by the danger of being unable to climb a modest hill due to loss of power by the automatic cutoff, and helplessly sliding backwards into other vehicles or immovable objects.
Now I’m confused - my husband’s 2012 Mustang has traction control (and snow tires), and he drives it all winter long (on snow and ice) with very few problems.
My 2005 Corolla has front wheel drive and snow tires, and I drive it all winter long with few problems, too. Both cars are manual transmission cars - I think that helps, too. I don’t know how big a factor our decades of winter driving experience is.
Don’t know either. I’m kinda surprised that a manual transmision car has traction control.
I’ve been driving over the C/divide in central Colorado twice a day for 22 years. The anit-loc brakes are OK.
But having traction control cut your power off for two seconds because of a little bit of wheel slip can suck. I do really love my '04 Pathfinder, but I do miss my '98 manual trans Pathfinder. I could swing it around a corner and punch it on snow or ice and go. (I’m not a mad man or bad driver. Never been in any accident. There are some situations in snow that the best way is to scoot the rear end around).
I moved from Nashville (snow every year) to Atlanta (some snow sometimes) just in time for Snowjam 82. I’ve never seen such silliness in all my life. People were abandoning their cars in the middle of the Interstate, and all the surface streets were clogged with stuck cars.
I was driving my 1966 MG Midget around all day in the snow, and never had a problem. As you can see, it’s not exactly an off-road snow machine. Still, I drove it for years in snow, and it always handled beautifully, even with plain tires on it.
I’m not knocking drivers who only see snow once every 8 years. You can’t learn if you don’t have snow, but I see a lot of cars crash in Chicago every year, and I don’t think it’s the car’s fault! The world is a much more dangerous place without old MGs and Triumphs driving around!
I’ve been driving a Prius in Minnesota for four years with two issues.
Once, when we had over a foot of snow, I couldn’t get up a hill and had to back out and go a different way using less steep roads that had been plowed and sanded.
Once, when we had over a foot of snow and the snowplow came through and no one had snowplowed out the bearm at the bottom of the driveway, I stupidly tried to get through and got hung up.
I’ve learned I can’t “rock it” through, but I don’t have trouble as long as I have clearance.
I’m surprised that the Prius doesn’t have a way to easily turn off traction control without risking damage to the car. Every car I’ve ever had that had traction control had a switch to turn it off, including my current car, an Insight hybrid.
I just asked my husband about this, and he loves his traction control (and his manual transmission). He finds that the traction control reacts very well to slippery conditions. We do, however, have to turn it off to do the reverse flick in parking lots.
It implies the car needs traction control to operate. I seriously doubt it but doing this would probably be logged on the computer and risk voiding the warranty. If I was stuck in the snow because of zero traction I would disable the TC long enough to get unstuck but that’s me.
