Granted, but for that many drivers to run into trouble (as opposed to a single idiot driver), one would reasonably assume that the road conditions changed abruptly at the point where the pile-up occurred.
My point in the rest of my anecdote above was that it sometimes doesn’t matter how fast you are going when you hit conditions like that. Your speed only affects how bad the impact will be, not whether you can stop or not.
Snow tires may have helped. Antilock brakes did not, in my case.
Meh. What would a bunch of guys from Saskatchewan know about driving in winter conditions?
That’s a logical explanation, but it’s belied by the fact that there is packed snow visible all along the roadway in the video. I think a better explanation is that people generally don’t modify their driving style to suit snow conditions.
Ding ding ding! We have a winner. I see it all the time with fog or heavy rain as well. People barrel along, and often get away with it, which just encourages them.
Well, they’re getting their information from the Norwegians, so I’d think they’re at least somewhat credible.
Or they didn’t modify it enough. If they had slowed down from 70 to 45/35 (and it doesn’t look like they were necessarily going even that fast, but my ability to judge speed is not the best), they probably would have been OK right up until there was an actual blocked highway in front them that they couldn’t steer around by changing lanes. And in that case, based on how cars were sliding into that mess, any speed over 5 or 10 probably would have resulted in a crash.
I’m not the guy to actually do it, but it must be possible to figure speed by timing how long it takes them to pass identifiable makes of car with known lengths. Looks fast to me.
Don’t believe it. We Saskatchewanians are in-credible. 
A trailer length is about 50 feet. I timed the cars going between the trailers, and it took them about a second. So, I estimate those last three cars were going about 35 mph. It’s a little hard to time because the camera was moving back and forth.
You can also do the same for the tractor trailers that went into the ditch by estimating how far away they are when they are first seen. I think the calculations came out the same, about 30 to 35.
And that’s the speed they had slowed down to by the time they’re next to the truck. So assuming an initial speed of over 50 beforehand is probably not an unreasonable guess.
FYI, my car (05 Pontiac Vibe), on a snow-covered road like that, has a braking distance of probably about three or four car-lengths going along at about 35 or 40. That’s full-on ABS panic stop. Granted, it’s not a precise measurement, but a lot of times when the weather is like that, I’ll do a test panic stop just to see how quickly I can stop if I need to (of course, I make sure nobody is behind me beforehand), I’ll usually gauge it by slamming on the brakes right as I pass a sign, pole, or something similarly useful. That distance is with winter tires on all four wheels of the car.
So if a car length is 15 feet, four of them would be 60 feet, roughly the length of a tractor-trailer. In other words, many of those drivers would have stopped soon enough to avoid crashing if they had had winter shoes on their cars. TireRack’s tests seem to confirm those numbers.
An engineer friend of mine once said “No matter how skilled a man is, that same man PLUS A TOOL will be better.”
So true!
Monocracy and Coastal, thanks for the calculations. Very interesting.