Around the neighborhood, I see people spending 10-30 minutes shoveling out their snowed-in cars - making a circuit around the vehicle, straining and tossing away pile after pile of show until they can easily pull out of their parking spots.
I went to my car and scraped off the windows while it warmed up. Then I got in, and even though the car was buried in snow up to the middle of the doors, I angled the wheels and stomped on the gas, bursting through the accumulated snow and leveling off in the street, where I continued on my merry way. (It helps that I have a V6 engine, but my car is otherwise a boring sedan).
What’s the deal with shoveling out - is there a reason to do it other than fear that you won’t be able to otherwise make it out of the snowed-in space?
Are you talking about shoveling out when parked in their private driveway? Or on street parking?
For on street parking I always to the windows and then hop in and leave- then again I drive an Avalanche most days.
In my driveway at home, I dust off my car and plow the driveway so my wife who parks in our garage can get out. I bull through most of the rest of the snow.
Other reasons could include dusting off the front and rear lights. etc…etc…
It really depends on the type of snow and the amount.
If it’s light, it’s not a problem to do exactly what you said. We got a bunch of powder last night, it blew in to drifts which were a half-meter to a meter tall all round my car, I just backed out as usual. No problem. We shoveled when I got home.
On the other hand, were it heavy wet packing snow, there’s no way I could’ve go the car out.
Another reason is if it stays. If we were to get freezing rain tonight, it would make the driveway unusable until you shoveled it out. If it warms up, all this light puffy snow becomes wet, heavy snow, and you’re stuck again.
a. When you just drive away, you compress the surrounding snow. Once it melts a bit and hardens, you’ve got icy tread marks and humps of snow in your parking spot.
b. Back in prehistory when everyone had rear-drive cars and tires without decent treads, driving through snow was a lot tougher. You tend not to see cars just futilely spinning their wheels nowadays.
Were you parallel parked? I’m assuming in Chicago you were, but blasting out of a snowed in parallel spot sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. I keep a shovel in the back of my truck for when I’m street parking, it just seems less risky to move some of that snow to give me room.
In some cases, the driver may intend to return and park in the same spot. If the snow is likely to be there for a while, this probably works a lot better than blasting out and having to blast back in. I understand that some neighborhoods have a “street etiquette” where if you shovel out the space, you can claim it as yours.
Also, if you were parked on the street and a snowplow buried you in there is a chance that you could scratch up your paint job by attempting to drive through some of the crunchyer stuff with salt and gravel in it. Espcially of it has thawed and re-frozen.
Depending on the snow, and the ground clearance of the car, it can be deceptively easy to get high centered on a drift. If you miscalculate the amount of speed needed to blast through, then you are stuck deep.
If the snow is high enough and icy enough so that it’s not very compressable, you could “high center” on the snow and do some serious damage to the underside of your car. I managed to break a motor mount on a pickup truck by going over snow that had been plowed up on my driveway. You could also do some damage to your exhaust, muffler, catalytic converter, etc.
No, instead the fsck’ing traction control bonks out and you can’t move anywhere while the light is green, and angry guys in 4x4 SUV’s who are behind me (err… behind you) start honking, and then the light is red again and you have to do the old fashioned rocking of your car to try to get free, and then realize that there’s an off button for the traction control, and once you gun it something takes and you make it in the next traffic split. Can you tell I really missed having my Expedition today?
Well now we know one of the people who drives merrily along with two feet of snow on the roof, blowing into whoever’s behind them, and not having any visible headlights or tail lights, with a big smirk on his face, 'cause he’s not one of the suckers who spend a half hour digging out.
At least he cleared the windows. I’ve seen drivers with a little circle cleared on the windshield, and all the other windows blocked.
I’m with you. Do the minimum work to get out and make liberal use of the gas pedal. If you are anticipating a snowstorm and are parking in a lot, park your car such that you have to back out with FWD or pull straight out with RWD. This way, your tires will have little trouble gripping the road surface underneath your car, where there’s no snow. Better yet, when you pull into your spot, don’t pull in all of the way. That way, when you want to leave, you pull forward first before backing up; this way, you get even more of a running start. Why bust your ass to clean out a spot? That just makes it more attractive to people looking to steal your spot, important if you live in a townhouse with no assigned spots, like I do. Also, clean only enough snow off of your car to see safely. Then, drive to an empty parking lot at a shopping center and park in the middle of nowhere. Now clean your hood, trunk, roof, etc., dumping the snow where it won’t get in your way. The hood is especially easy, since engine heat will dislodge the snow/ice pretty easily.
It’s true you can underestimate how fast you have to go to ram through the snow. You could get stuck and thus be forced to work harder to clear the snow than you would have if you had cleared it the first time. And if the snow is hard packed from a plow’s run, you could damage your car. But yeah, I think way too many people are overly fussy about digging out their cars. My take is that they’re afraid of the “power it out” approach. Pussies.
Sometimes it is just because a person is a neat freak. I once watched a guy in Boston clear his car after a snowstorm. He started off with the standard stuff of clearing his windshield and windows then I noticed that he was taking an unusually detailed approach. This snow wasn’t from a storm but just a modest coating. He walked around his car and dusted and then he repeated and repeated for a good 15 minutes until all traces of snow were gone. Only then did dare get in and start the engine.
I am a rammer myself. However, a broke part of the rear suspension off of my BMW being overly aggressive and ramming a mound of hard plowed snow reapeatedly.
Please…is this a problem? By the time you’re moving fast enough to clear the snow from your vehicle, it’s no worse than some other blowing snow coming on your car. It’s not like all 2 feet of snow fell onto your windshield at once. If it bothers you that much, increase your following distance.
However in the wrong conditions, the heap of snow could slither off the roof and down onto your driver’s window or back onto your rear window, rendering you without visibility. It’s just dumb to drive around with all that snow on your vehicle.
Yes, it is. The less snow blowing around, the better. Just because you don’t think it’s much doesn’t mean the guy behind you can see. And clear your lights while you’re at it too.
Another reason not to plow through snow is that you have a fuel tank on the bottom of your car. I had a 3’-4’ pile of snow at the end of my drive that had been piled up the the snow plow. I just threw the car in reverse and slammed through it.
There was enough force to jam the steel straps that hold my gas tank to my car into the tank and cause a small leak. $110 for a new tank and $200 for a new pump (the steel lines going into the old pump were rusted and broke off when I took off the old tank) are two reasons to shovel yourself out before you just bust through a pile of snow.