The “no brake” part is what gets most people, I think. When you’re not in control, you really, really want to reduce your speed and give yourself more time to react to things, and hitting the break seems like how you’d do that.
Luckily, in these days of anti-lock brakes on nearly everything, this can be reduced to “stand on the brakes and aim where you want to go.”
7 years of living in Alaska made this instinctive.
I’m the only one who said “no” so far, but I didn’t read the OP before I voted.
I’m from Ohio so of course I know how to get my shit together if my car starts tailing around in the snow or whatever. I’m especially adept at it at the moment, as it would seem that my tires are bald.
But when I voted, I was thinking some full-blown spin out on the highway, where someone smashed into my backend and sent me in circles. Or even if it happened in the snow with no accident, but literally is spinning around in circles. I thought maybe there was some special way to handle that…didn’t realize the poll meant “just sliding around a bit.”
Oh well.
I spent much of my adult life in New England and Chicago - so yes, many times.
I always thought that the “steer into the skid” advice was needlessly confusing. When your back end slides left that means that looking forward your car will be pointing right of where you want to go, so you will instinctively turn left which is correct. A novice will do it correctly, when you tell him to steer into it he’ll overthink it. So take your foot off the gas and steer gently in the direction you want to go.
I know to steer into in and lay off the pedals but once I hit ice that was like glass and the car did about 4 360s and once you’re in that bad a position I doubt anything can be done to recover.
“Steer into the skid” is correct, and sounds correct to anyone who already knows what to do. It is often ambiguous, or incorrectly understood to someone who doesn’t.
Pretty much everyone I have taught thought it meant the opposite. Possibly selection bias, as they told me they didn’t know how to drive on slick roads.
If a car begins rotating right on it’s own, then it is entering a skid to the left. As the driver recovers, it will begin rotating to the left, even though still in a left skid. Lots of people who have been told to steer into the skid will turn the wheel right when the car starts to rotate to the right, because that is how they misunderstood the advice.
This decoupling of the rotation rate, direction of skid and steering input is part of what the students brain has to adjust to. The other big thing is to gain the confidence to maintain the correct steering input even though it seems to have no effect…cause it often takes a bit before it works.
If someone isn’t getting it, I have them turn their head to keep their nose pointed where they want to go. The wheel usually follows without conscious input…not enough usually, but at least the correct direction.
I beg to differ. I haven’t seen any indication of instinct guiding drivers in a skid or slide. The only instinctive response I’ve ever seen is SLAMMING on the brake and then STANDING (full pressure) on them.
But I do agree that “steer into the skid” is confusing. I say; ‘Point the front wheels in the direction you WANT the car to go, and keep them pointed in that direction as best you can.’
I struggled with what term to use. I didn’t just want to say “skid”, because that includes straight line motion with no yaw. But as you’re pointing out, “spin” isn’t as clear as I thought it was.
This, absolutely. Kittens play at stalking and pouncing on each other, and this sort of play helps them become adept at executing those skills when it mom stops giving them milk and they have to go catch their own lunch. Likewise, anyone wanting to develop their abilty at recovering control of an out-of-control vehicle ought to play/practice whenever safe opportunties to do so arise - and they should practice enough so that they don’t have to think when an unexpected skid happens during normal driving.
Yes, we used to purposefully fishtail on dirt roads in high school.
As a mildly off-topic but hopefully amusing aside, I once turned into a parking lot where there was a huge, ground-level localized cloud of snow (weird!) surrounding a passenger car with its front-end smashed in, sitting slightly aback from a parking bollard (waist-high concrete-reinforced metal pole). In the car were a dazed-looking guy with a bleeding forehead sitting in the driver’s seat and a girl yelling at him from the passenger’s seat. It took me a moment to realize that he had seen a mound of snow in the otherwise mostly-clear parking lot, had a “Watch this!” moment with his girlfriend, and then rammed the snow pile, not realizing that the reason the mound was there was because the plow had piled the snow around the bollard, burying it. Almost felt sorry for the guy.
AS some have said, this is entirely instinctive, except for the not braking part.
I was going to post the same thing.
I know how to handle a skid (and do it frequently when screwing around in the snow), but one time I was driving along with kids in the car, it was flat and straight, I was going 20 mph on the freeway due to conditions, suddenly the car was spinning around and within a split-second it came all the way around and I continued driving forward as if nothing had happened.
It was so fast I didn’t have time to react, and I doubt any kind of steering would have changed the situation.
I will repeat what others have said. I live in an area with a lot of snow and ice so I have to do this every once in a while.
The only thing that causes some problems is if I am skidding and there is an object in the way (say another car or a tree). Then sometimes my instincts are more about getting my back end (where the kids are) away from impending doom.
30 Northern Wisconsin winters.
Yes
One would think so, but it’s not just southerners who don’t know what they’re doing on icy roads! 
Verbal instructions about how to handle a skid/spin in the car are inherently always confusing (IMHO). The front end of the car is rotating in one direction, the rear end another, and the tires are supposed to turn opposite the direction that the front of the car is turning? Or is that towards the direction that the rear of the car is going? Or towards the direction that the front is going? Or is it if the car is turning clockwise I should turn the wheel clockwise as well, or counter-clockwise?
Too much room for confusion. Draw a diagram with vector arrows, I say, and it should explain itself pretty darned easily!
I’ve always felt this is communicated in a terrible way. “Steer into the skid”? “Steer the same way as the back of the car is going”? Neither of those sound intuitive, but when your car starts skidding, steering the way you are supposed to feels completely intuitive. There has to be a better way to communicate that… just steer to try to keep the car on the road, dangit. If your view is swinging to the right, steer left, etc.
The part that is less intuitive for many is staying off the brakes. Although, shouldn’t ABS brakes limit the damage hitting the brakes can do in a skid anyways?
I’ve practiced on icy parking lots, but never had to recover in an unplanned spin. I do everything I can to stay home in snowy weather, it just doesn’t happen enough around here to gain any proficiency.
Y’all are making me dizzy! I think I see the confusion here, and it has nothing to do with FWD, AWD, RWD, and everything to do with *which *tires have lost grip.
In an “understeer,” where the front tires are the ones without grip, “steer into the skid” is the strategy to get the tires sraight so they grab the road again, but it doesn’t have to last all that long before you “steer where you want to go.” Some websites try to fudge it, instead of saying “steer into the skid”, they say, “release a bit of steering,”. Same diff.
The car will spin when the grip of the rear tires is lost. The fix action is to get them to grip again by slowing down, straightening the car out so that the tread is in line with the actual direction of travel, and getting weight on the rear axle. This last bit is where hitting the brakes is detrimental, because doing so will transfer weight off of the rear axle and cause the tires to have even less grip. You can actually apply throttle to help the situation, but this is extremely counter-intuitive, and in a RWD car is likely to spin the rear tires and make the situation much, much worse.
ABS will help with the “straightening the car out” part, but if you’re standing on the brakes so hard that the ABS has kicked in, the damage has either already been done or it wasn’t that bad of a spin to begin with.