Last night, Harborwolf and I took our daughter out to dinner to celebrate her 8th birthday. The weather was iffy, and the roads were slick, but we wanted her to take her out for Chinese.
After dinner, it was fairly dark, and we had about 15 miles to go, so I was driving EXTRA carefully. We got to this road that has a very steep hill. Of course, we were going down the hill. I drove SO slow, but it didn’t matter. I could feel the tires starting to lose traction, and I could feel the car starting to turn from the momentum. I gripped the wheel, and tapped the break, but it didn’t matter. We were gaining speed, and I had totally lost control of the steering. There was a car almost directly behind us, and there were other cars climbing the hill in the opposite lane. My car turned sideways in a fast, terrifying spin and went almost the entire 360 degrees. At the end of the spin, the back end of my car was sitting in one of the roads that connects to the main road. Without saying a word, I just pulled back onto the road and continued on my way. It must have looked amazing to the car behind me, like I was doing a stunt or something.
Upon regaining control of my car, I immediately burst into tears and started shaking uncontrollably. I was babbling to Harborwolf about I almost killed our family and I was sorry. He assured me that everything was fine, and that no one was hurt etc. He turned to our daughter in the back and asked if she was okay. She giggled and said she thought it was really fun to spin, :smack: and she wanted to do it again.
You need to go out to an empty parking lot in the car and practice sliding around and regaining control. Knowing how to control a car beyond the limit is an extremely important skill.
Years and years ago I was with all my fraternity brothers at a function in a remore setting way back in the hills. Leaving, we were following a brother’s car through the windy, curvy woods and travelling altogether too fast. Suddenly our car departed from the road and plunged headfirst into a heavily treed ravine. Bursting through the canopy, we were shocked and oh so relieved to see that no large immobile trunks were in our direct path, only small brush. I’ll never forget as we came flying up the other side looking over at the startled face of yet another car of our brothers as they saw us suddenly emerge from the dense canopy, get all four wheels in the air and land ahead of them perfectly positioned on the road and continue our drive home.
I’ve always felt that I was a good driver, and prepared for sliding in these horrid Michigan winters, but I wasn’t expecting this. This was different. What should I have done differently?
Oh dear lord. Going by the OP’s description, there was nothing she COULD do. These things happen.
Perhaps you need to find a clue, and practice displaying some sympathy for a bad situation. Knowing how to control your urge to appear superior is an extremely important skill.
For one thing, when you’ve started to lose control of your vehicle, it’s a bad idea to hit the brakes. That’s often going to complete the disassociation between your wheels, and the road - leaving you with no control. A better response is to power out of a spin, and accellerate a little to regain control. You turn, slightly into the direction of the spin, so that the direction of travel, and the wheels are aligned, then increase power so that the car is again moving in agreement with the control surfaces - then accellerate a little and turn, carefully, out of the spin.
Granted, this is hard to train oneself to do. Bill Cosby has a line about it feeling like ‘leaning into a punch.’ But it works better than panic braking.
Stayed in bed that day? 
Oh, my Johnny, that’s the first thing I thought of too, and it’s been years since I’ve seen that show!