Practice winter driving
 

I don't know how many other people were taught this but I thought I would share in the hopes that it might help other people learn how to drive in the snow and ice.

When I was just learning how to drive my Dad would take me out to a HUGE vacant parking lot after a snow storm late at night. First he'd have me drive in a large square around the parking at about 5 mph. The point of this was to basically create a pair of tracks in the snow to follow. Then he'd have me drive the square at different speeds. First 10 mph, then 15 mph and 20 mph trying to follow the same line without spinning out when we had to turn for a corner. You'd do this going counter clockwise and then clockwise. After a while the snow would become compacted because of all the times your driving over the same area. And towards the end you'd essentially be driving on ice.

The whole point of the exercise is so that you know how your car behaves in the snow and you know what to do when your car suddenly loses grip or slides. I think the couple hours I spent doing this with my Dad when I was about 17 years old saved me from wrecking my car a bunch of times when I had to drive in the snow.

The FRS is the first rear wheel drive car I've ever owned. I had a solid 3 inches of snow fall in central Pennsylvania tonight so I headed out to the largest vacant parking lot I could find. It wasn't any where close to being big enough to make a square track but I ended up just throwing the car around for a good 20 minutes getting an idea of how FR-S behaves in the snow. Just doing this gave me such a better feel for the car and what to do if I skid in the snow or ice.

It's my opinion that it's better to know what to do when your car starts to spin out or slide on ice or snow in a controlled environment rather then getting your first experience on a public road in a potentially life or death situation.

Also my FR-S has winter tires on it and I was still able to get the car to spin out and slide around very easily.

I have been babying my FR-S too much to take it out in the snow. But I do similar things with my Corolla and Jeep. Rip the hand brake so I start a spin and try and gain control back. Stuff like that. I have found that winter driving is 50% knowing your vehicle and 50% being able to think.

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Good post. I did this with my BRZ when we had our first snowfall. It's almost a must if you want to be confident in how your car will behave in the snow, and what the limits are. This isn't my first RWD car, and there is even a learning curve there (not as big as FWD vs RWD obviously).

Good job!

I do it with every car I drive to get a feel for how it's going to behave. Right now I'm driving a beat-ass Mercedes E320 4-Matic. It actually did surprisingly well last night in 1" of snow despite the fact that one of the coil springs is broken, the brakes are shot and the tires are mis-matched LOL. I didn't like how hard the traction control came on, so I shut it off and relied on my human traction control. Much better!