This morning I happened to click on the weather channel.I almost never click on that channel.That guy said, If your car is rear wheel drive, stay home! cuhulin
- posted
13 years ago
This morning I happened to click on the weather channel.I almost never click on that channel.That guy said, If your car is rear wheel drive, stay home! cuhulin
snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net wrote in news:6076-4D2B8861-617@storefull-
3172.bay.webtv.net:
No way. RWD is way more fun that FWD on snowy roads. Just remember to take a case of beer to help pass the time once you land in the ditch.
So much misinformation out there. best snow car I ever had was my Porsche 944 with Dunlop Winter Sports. Now that may not be the best car overall in snow but tires make more difference than what end's wheels are driven; and given decent weight dist and high polar moment I'd prefer RWD thanks.
nate
A Corvair with winter tires will just keep going. Around the wrecked super duper automatic this and electronic that.
I agree! I used do 360's in intersections.
Nate Nagel wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@roosters.net:
Not when you're having fun doing donuts and let it get away from you. Thats when you learn there is such a thing as too-much fun.
Yeah, but you can't do donuts or slide the ass-end out in a FWD car, which is what I meant in my original reply.
Me too.
Like nate wrote, tires, tires and TIRES.
Give me an empty road, RWD, and proper snow tires and I love driving in the snow.
A Snowmobile. cuhulin
Yeah the Corvair is great in the snow but the heater sucks unless you have a gas heater. :)
25+ years ago, we had a pretty bad ice storm in a small town where I lived. (Less than 600 people) At that time, there was a young, large woman (okay, she was a fat chick. sorry) who drive a Chevette. A half dozen of us guys riding in my car never laughed so hard when she would intentionally spin doughnuts at this one intersection by cranking the steering wheel and hitting the emergency brake, repeatedly. Every guy in our car had sore torso muscles the next day from laughing so hard. I don't make fun of people, obese people included, but there was something about a Chevette with a women driver who seemingly took up every inch of usable interior space doing doughnuts through a deserted intersection that seemed amusing. Of course, a bunch of beer in our system probably didn't make matters any better.
m6> Yeah the Corvair is great in the snow but the heater sucks unless you
I do have the 'instant heat and lots of it' units installed.
Nice in the cold, but more importantly your engine runs much cooler on hot days or at speed without all the lower baffles.
There is, or used to be available accesory gas heaters for aircooled VWs.
On paydays, people doing donuts in the parking lots, getting out of Dodge. cuhulin
Best one I ever had was a '72 Toyota Corona with plain old standard (non snow) Bias Ply tires on it. Thing was a tank.
Oh, and RWD, too.
Sure you can! As long as you don't have a SAAB with the e brake on the front wheels (Actually, you CAN, but it ain't easy)
Just get up some steam, turn the wheel, hit the e brake until you start the spin, let off and hit the gas! Simple!
There's a reason Subaru named the 360 the 360...
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B wrote in news:hJSWo.31016$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe16.iad:
Now, in your FWD car, do this for minutes on end, without pausing unless you stall the engine or end up in the ditch...
Oh, that's much different. Never mind...
In my observation, FWD has a traction advantage as long as you:
1) go in a straight line 2) start off slowly 3) don't abruptly change speed 4) don't encounter changes in traction (like, traversing ruts in the snow)In my observation, FWD loses the advantage as soon as:
A) you turn the wheel while moving - Toe-out on turns makes the wheels fight each other. In slippery conditions this means breaking traction. Also, a wheel only has so much "traction". Instead of using 100% traction for one purpose (driving or turning) you're splitting it between the two. Something's going to give. It doesn't mean understeer every time, but it makes it more likely. This is further compounded by combining the driving axle, steering axle and most effective braking axle.
B) take off too hard and shift the weight to the rear axle. Not exactly game over, but this is why you see people at stoplights spinning their wheels so much. They seem to think that more gas will make them go faster, when the opposite is true.
C) fail to match wheel speed to road speed, which is something that takes skill, and even skilled drivers have minimal feedback to tell how well they are doing. This means you may need to accelerate down a snowy hill with a curve in it. In RWD you can let the foot off the gas, and your rear tires may slide a little, but they'll also slow you down. Any oversteer you get out of it will likely be slow and easily correctable. This will be very different if engine braking breaks traction on your steering wheels.
D) have the road surface change under one drive wheel only- this can cause torque steer, disrupt your momentum or even yank the wheel out of your hands. If you are also turning, you could have sudden and violent shifts between understeer and oversteer. Probably not complete doom and gloom at 25mph, but for the paranoid drivers that freak out at the smallest thing, this could mean them going up on the sidewalk and ruining a pedestrian's day.
But I'm not an engineer. I could be smoking goodyear freckles in a water bong filled with burnt Type F.
-J
It snows a fair amount here (Syracuse), though not as much as people claim. I've been driving 40 years. (That may just mean I'm old.) At least for the conditions here (and driving Cavaliers with not-so-great tires, memory impairment, etc), I feel like I've had much more trouble with FWD. If the road is greasy with salt & slush, and there's much of a crown, FWD seems prone to pulling down the crown.
And, going around a corner on that grease, if the front loses traction, you're SOL. With RWD (and bigger cars, I suppose), the front was relatively lighter, and it seems like I could corner better, using steering plus varying power to the back.
YMMV.
You're not too far off, and mentioned a lot of mistakes all the Marios make in the first snow storm.
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.