So I tried to go to work this afternoon. I almost made it. I was driving along at about 30 miles an hour when the car in front of me, for no discernable reason, decided to slam on his brakes. I was a few car lengths behind, but in snowy weather that’s not a whole lot of room so I hit my brakes too. And started pulling to the right. I hit the brakes harder. Kept sliding. Ended up hitting a building, where the air bag exploded in my face. Cracked the bumper a bit, and if the air bag hadn’t gone off I would have continued on to work, but at least I wasn’t hurt.
(I hit a building at the corner of Southwest Blvd and 26th Street, for you Kansas Citians.)
Now I’m out my deductible and however much my insurance will go up for being a dumbass. But I can’t be the only one, right? Please tell me your crappy, first-day-of-winter driving stories.
I once did a complete 360-degree skidded turn on Storrow Drive (one of Boston’s most crowded arteries). It was perfect: no warning, lose traction, spin one complete turn, recover, continue on as if nothing had happened. There were cars near me, but I somehow managed to miss them. Several other cars were seen to spin off the road - I was the only one (that I saw) who recovered nonchalantly and continued as if this were normal.
Ya gotta modulate those brakes - standing on them doesn’t work.
Amen to that. Standing on them is the worst thing you can do. You have to pump 'em - and if you’re on black ice don’t bother with brakes at all - you’re stuck with steering at that point.
I used to live on the side of a small mountain in Vermont. This was in 1996 when there was ridiculous amounts of snow. I had a small pickup truck which was terrible in the snow but I did the best I could. One night, it was snowing hard and I knew I might have problems getting up the snow covered dirt road to my farmhouse but I figured I would give it a try. As I approached the long, steep road to the house, I floored it to get as much speed as possible. I started going up the hill which led about 1/2 mile before my house and my wheels started spinning and I started going slower and slower. Eventually, I just stopped with the wheels spinning and I couldn’t move. I figured I would just abandon the vehicle and drive back down the next morning.
Then, I felt a lurch and my truck started sliding BACKWARDS down the hill with no end in sight. The bottom of the hill was a primitive T intersection with a big stream on the other side that I would land once I slid to the bottom. I was picking up speed way faster than I hoped and just sliding backwards uncontrollably. My urge was to jump out but by the time I thought that through, I was already going to fast and getting faster. I don’t know what made me do it but I just grabbed the wheel and spun it as fast and as hard as I could. That put me into an uncontrollable spin but it did slow me down and the, all of the sudden, I spun around very quickly and landed in the driveway of the only neighbor I had close by. I couldn’t have ask for better.
I still didn’t know how to get my truck out of the driveway or down the hill but, in true country style, two guys in a big truck from the volunteer fire department came by about 10 minutes later. I convinced them to lower me back down the road with a cable attached to their truck so at least I could get to school safely the next day.
Not quite an accident, more of a disaster . . . I learned to drive relatively late (age 27) and had only been driving for four months when I moved from California to Nevada, placing the Sierras between myself and my family. It was Febrauary when, after only one more month driving under my belt, I returned to the Bay Area to visit and to adopt a cat who was with me on the return trip, which wound up being in a blizzard. So I was driving around in the snow, with a cat who was not happy at spending hours and hours with some stranger in a car. This was my introduction into driving with snow chains, obviously, which I at least had the sense to hire someone else to put on for me.
Did I mention that this expedition was being conducted in a nineteen year old Ford Pinto station wagon?
So I inched over Donner Summit until I was past the snow controls and thought, well, it was beyond me to put the chains on, but surely I could remove them myself, right?
You can figure out for yourselves that I was of course wrong, but the best part was when I realized I had locked myself out of my car, with the engine and lights and wipers on (and one unhappy cat inside). It was still snowing. Oh, and I was running out of gas, and wasn’t familiar enough yet with the car to know how close I could cut it.
Passerby took pity on me and 1) helped me get the chains off and 2) broke the window so I could get in the car. Drove the last forty miles (still snowing and icy, of course, and now dark) with cold air blasting in and freaking out me and the cat.
All I wanted to do was get home but I had to stop at a gas station ten miles from my destination because if I hadn’t it was obviously going to be the perfect end to a perfect day.
So I never did have an actual accident in the snow (or anywhere else) because the older I get the more I realize how lucky I was that day and that I have probably used up a huge allotment of my lifetime driving luck so I had better be really, really careful!
One of the first times I drove in the snow, I thought I was being cautious while pulling out of my neighborhood and making the right turn to head to school. Nope. Did a 180 and almost hit a road sign. Luckily, the stop light down the road was red so no cars were coming at me. I got turned back around and pulled into the church parking lot next door, light a cigarette, and called my mom freaked out.
I hate hate hate driving in snow, rain, ice, etc. HATE.
Funny tidbit - was watching the local news earlier hoping to catch the weather. They did a segment on driving conditions. Showed an almost accident involving 3 cars that all ended up in the ditch on the side of the road instead of hitting each other. They showed the drivers standing around after while their cars were in the ditch. One girl had on DAISY DUKES. Short shorts! It was 20 degrees today! Wtf?
Driven in snow since my learners permit and only got stuck once. I was coming home for Christmas from Los Angeles to Tahoe. It started snowing HARD in Bishop. I motored on. Snow got really deep and drifty around Lee Vining. No plows were running. I motored on. Not another car in sight for hours. One fool in a Four-runner passed me going way too fast, and about three minutes after his taillights disappeared, I saw his tracks weave around and off into the ditch. Couldn’t even see the vehicle. I motored on. Got to Gardnerville and it was not too bad, only about a foot and a half, maybe. I motored up Kingsbury. Got to the top and headed down. Turned onto my street, which is the steepest damn street around, and has a dead 90 degree turn just before the steepest part…
And didn’t make it. All that way, thru all that snow, and I got stuck on my own street!
I did that on an off-ramp. I was just a young thing and to put it bluntly, I panicked. I didn’t know how to get the car under control again. There I was, spinning in circles. I look up to see a semi barelling down the ramp toward me with the driver miming, "I can’t stop!" (He was using the same handsignals as a ref in a football game does to signal “no touchdown” and shaking his head back and forth, mouthing the words. I can still see it as clear as day.)
“Oh dear. This looks like the end,” I thought. Well, no-- It was actually more along the lines of "Oh shit! I’m fucked!" Thankfully, the car skidded to a halt near the edge of the ramp. I punched the gas and with a little tire-spinning, I managed to get off of the road before the truck could flatten me. There couldn’t have been an inch to spare.
Oh my goodness, Lissa. My heart is pounding just reading that.
Mine have been more pedestrian than that. Some fucker in a BMW pulled out in front of me on the morning after a snowfall and I hit my brakes. Yes, that was dumb, and it was dumb to kept them hit. I did a perfect 180 and landed on the shoulder facing the opposite direction. I was really lucky because the road was busier than on the typical morning when I see maybe two other cars.
I also was going about 35 once on a road with a little bit of snow on it and I must have hit ice because I slid off the road. Again I didn’t know better than to hit the brakes. I ended up in what is normally a six-foot ditch but which was higher than the road because of the snow. Minor damage but the trouble was I was impaled on a tree trunk they used to mark the area for plows. Luckily friends came along who could get a hatchet and cut it from under the car.
I was really lucky one other time when it was actively snowing and I tried to make it up a short curvy hill. Again, someone was behind me which is rare. I started slipping backwards and to the left and just braced myself to hit them. Somehow they blazed past me and thank goodness there was no one behind the blind curve up above. :eek: I slid backwards into the lefthand ditch. I managed to get myself out of that but idiot of idiots I decide to try it again. This time I am really stuck but someone comes to help push me out.
You’ll notice that I haven’t done anything bad when it’s snowing hard and the streets aren’t clear. That’s because when that happens I don’t go out, or I go 15 mph and there’s no way to have real impact on the car!
I grew up in an area of West Virginia that gets a lot of snow. The air goes rushing across the flat part of Ohio, then hits the mountains and rises, which makes it dump all of its moisture on West Virginia and eastern Ohio.
It was December, during winter finals my senior year of high school. The snow started coming down. This is an area where they generally don’t cancel school because of snow, and they made an announcement that eveyone was to go home NOW because of the snow, so we knew that this was getting pretty bad out. Normally, we weren’t allowed to drive our own cars to school because of limited parking areas, but an exception was made during finals week, so I had caught a ride with a friend of mine. We all piled into his car, me and him in the front seat, and his girlfriend and her friend in the back seat, and we started heading down off of the hill. Normally, we would have gone down the front road of the hill, but because he had his girlfriend with him, we went down the back road so that we would end up close to her house.
Here we are, going down a typical steep West Virginia country road, going nice and slow because the snow is really bad. I see my friend start to turn the wheel, and the car keeps going straight. So I give him a look. He notices that I’m looking at him, and turns the wheel completely to the left. The car keeps going straight. He turns the wheel right. The car keeps going straight. Meanwhile, the two girls are in the back seat, gabbing away, and they don’t realize that we are in a long 2 mph skid all the way down this long hillside. My friend and I just look at each other and shrug, and at 2 mph, we go sliiiiiiiiiiiide whump into a ditch. It was the most amazing slow motion crash you’ve ever seen. The girls finally look up from the back seat and ask what the hell we just did. My friend and I both burst out laughing and tell them didn’t you realize we’ve been skidding down this hill for the last couple hundred yards, then we all climb out and try to figure out how the heck we are going to get his mom’s car out of the ditch.
Fortunately, a guy in toyota 4x4 pulled up behind us. The guy jumped out and asked if we needed help, and used a chain to yank us out of the ditch. The guy still had the chain in his hand as we were piling back into our car, when another car did the exact same 2 mph crash into the exact same spot. The guy with the 4x4 just shook his head and said “I think I’m gonna be here a while.”
We also had a parked car slide down the hill in front of my mother’s house. It hit the car below it, and both cars slid down into a third car. Just some scuffed bumpers, no major damage. Our friend was ready to leave and my mother said “hey, where’s your car?” and our friend said “It’s right… uh… um…”
I did a perfect 180 on the Maine Turnpike and ended up with the right side of my car stuck in a snowbank, facing the wrong way on the highway. Three guys and a woman in a pickup pulled me out–which was good, as this was before cell phones and I hadn’t seen a single other car since Portland.
The first winter winter after I got my license, I was driving home from work - a usual teenage partime kind of job - a couple of days after a snowstorm. The roads were melting clear as I went to work, and seemed to be completely clear on my way home. About 5-10 miles into my return as the sun fell, having seen no snow on the roads so far, I roared up a sidestreet making a left hand turn going way too fast for dry conditions. Unfortunately, this street was lined with with big old maples that blotted out the sun and was covered in black ice. The angular momentum from my turn sent me spinning up the hill. I took my foot off the gas, and discovered that the steering wheel did absolutely nothing. So, I sat there watching mailboxes and trees go by for a couple of 360s waiting for gravity or an object to stop me. I came to a halt in the right lane in the right direction at the top of the hill at a stop sign like I’d pulled up to it. Nothing to do but look both ways, and make my right turn.
I was in a 1986 6-cylander Mustang with auto-trans. It was icy out. Amazingly, I managed to get about 3 miles away from home. I had just stopped at a stop sign at the top of a hill to let some other trafic pass. When the way was clear, I let off the brake and accelerated, and the car started to move slowly forward …then slower…then slower…then full stop. But the ride wasn’t over yet; in true ‘lightnin loops’ fashion, I was about to do it all again…backwards! I slid about 20 feet helplessly, as the steering wheel did nothing and the tires just spun, until the rear wheels hit the curb of the street behind me. My front end started to swing around and I thought I’d be off again further down the hill, but thankfully the Mustang was hung up on the curb.
We were dismissed early from school one day because a snow storm was a-coming. (In Maryland, it doesn’t take much for schools to close for inclement weather or even the possibility thereof but that’s for another thread.)
So I made it home o.k, a snow / ice wintry mix was falling and I decided I was going to walk the dog right away since as soon as I settled in, I was hunkering down and staying inside by the fire.
Now I didn’t bother changing from my work clothes and happened to be wearing a pair of dress shoes that had very little tread on them. (You can see where this is going.) All the same, I was very careful and made the walk by ambling about very gingerly.
The puppy finished his business and we were just about home. Temporarily casting prudence aside I made just the smallest of leaps from the grass to the sidewalk in front of the house and that’s all it took.
Both legs come flying out from under and just like in the cartoons, I’m pretty sure I was fully parallel before landing squarely on my back and falling hard on my right elbow –an injury that would eventually take months to heal. Glasses flew off the head, I’m sure the dog was thinking “What the hell is this goof-ball up to now?”
I regathered what was left of my composure and glasses, looked up and back the street to see if anyone witnessed the spectacle which I was going to play off with that I-meant-to-do-that stance and slunk away back inside and called it a day.
My 270-spinout was not in the ice and snow, so it doesn’t count here.
This was not an acident, but could have been because of that “but I gots ta see if I can” attitude: I was on a neighborhood street and approaching an intersection. The flat road suddenly ramped up a 40-degree slope to a two-lane no-sidewalk blacktop 15 feet in the air and sloped down a 40-degree slope on the other side. It was icy. As I approached I knew what was coming, and since there were no parked cars and no raffic around me, I decided to try. I gauged a speed and made it up 3/4 of the way before stopping and having the slide back down. I tried again and popped out on the icy blacktop and turned right; but just one hair more or less gas and the outcome would have been different.
Another day I went out to scrape the ice off the windshield. It sounded like a Blue-Norther was screaming through the air, but I just felt a bit of biting wind. I guessed the two-story walls of the apartment rows on each side of the street were blocking the worst of the wind but not he sound. After a bit of scraping I thought the wind scream sounded a bit odd, but looking around I saw nothing, just parked cars and the hood of one out on the main street. I continued with my scraper, remembering an old tale about kid with book-smarts but not practical smarts. He’d scraped ice off using the only thing handy - a rock - and was astonished later at all the bright rainbows and shafts of light when the sun finally struck his scratched-up windshield. Minutes later and the wind scream still sounded a bit odd. I looked around again. Everything was the same - except that car out on the main road was maybe 20 feet further. I coulds now see that its tires were spinning in a blur and could discern that was the source of the wind scream. A few minutes passed as I slowly watched it slip a few feet left off the center of the road and land against the curb. I always wondered if he ever figured out how to drive around ice, but felt he was safer until he did.
I grew up in Cleveland, and learned to drive in December. When I was in HS, my parents left me and my brother at home to go visit family out of state. They gave us a bit of money and the keys to the second car. So one saturday afternoon we decide to go to the mall. Its been snowing for a while, and there was at least 2 inches of snow on the roads. As I start to turn right out of the side street we live on, the car does a full 360 on the road. Me and my brother think this is the funniest thing we’ve ever seen, but dont think anything else of it.
We get about halfway to the mall when I make a very dumb mistake, and choose to take the backway there instead of staying on main roads. Im not 100 yards down the first road when the car starts skidding around, and bumps the curb. At little further down, it happens again. I realize Im not in complete control of the car, and go very slowly, skidding out every now and then. We manage to make it to the mall, and are afraid to leave. Its snowing the whole time. Finally, we set out for home. I white knuckled that car the entire way, and we seriosuly considered simply parking somewhere and walking several miles home. The car would skew in the snow every couple hundred yards, even if we just going straight. We were terrified.
When we made it home without incident, we called our parents told them our tale of woe, and my dad yelled at us for going out in the snow because I wasnt an experienced driver. He got home, and had a look at the car, and the tires were completely bald. He said it was amazing I was able to keep it under control at all much less get to and from the mall with it.