Having always lived at the top of fairly steep hills in Lancashire I consider myself to be fairly experienced when it comes to driving in the snow.
I remember in my late teens being advised to “get your speed up and hope you don’t meet anything coming down the hill” in order to get up the single-track road to my dad’s house in Lancashire.
Back in the day, particularly considering I was driving an S-reg Fiesta, a hill start in the snow wasn’t too tricky given that the car weighed less than a tonne.
But now things are much different. What with all the ‘added extras’ on modern cars which, individually, perhaps might not weigh so much but collectively they add up, so a current Fiesta could weigh more than 350kg above what my first car racked up on the scales.
My current car weighs 1.5 tonnes whereas the likes of a Range Rover can be more than 2.5 tonnes. So it’s no wonder you still see modern cars stranded in the snow – especially on hills.
The fact is that, no matter how much bigger the engine might be, heavier cars struggle in the snow or on ice. And then there’s another feature which adds to the problem.
I’ve recently discovered that rear wheel drive cars are useless in the snow. Or, at least, mine is.
While the benefits of rear wheel drive such as better handling, acceleration and braking, might be fine and dandy in the summer, it certainly has its disadvantages when trying to set off in snow, particularly on even the slightest incline.
When I looked out of the bedroom window last week and saw the blanket of snow covering the roads and pavements my heart sank. I just knew it would be a nightmare considering I had foolishly parked facing uphill.
And, lo and behold, my car creaked and groaned and eventually slipped backwards, so I ended up having to put some grit from the nearby public bin behind my rear wheels in order to set off.
In my family my older sister Kate is the expert at physics but as I am not I wasn’t entirely sure why a rear wheel drive vehicle would struggle more than a front wheel or all wheel drive car.
Mercedes explains it: “Rear-wheel-drive cars still suffer noticeably more than their front-wheel-drive counterparts when tackling slippery road surfaces. The reason for this lies largely with the fact that the engine is placed over the powering wheels in a front-wheel-drive vehicle. In contrast, it is usually the boot or open cargo space that sits above the powering wheels in rear-wheel-drive cars.
“The benefit of having the weight of the engine above the driving wheels is that it keeps them firmly planted to the ground. Without this added traction, wheel-spin and fishtailing occur more frequently when accelerating.
“One common suggestion for solving this problem is to load your rear-wheel-drive vehicle with added weight while driving in wintery conditions. By putting big bags of soil or sand into the boot you are creating the necessary grounding force to the rear of the car, where it needs it most.”
So the answer is more weight! No doubt resulting in greater fuel consumption. You couldn’t make it up.
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