LexFather

SMH....I tire of people every year going completely bonkers when there is a little ice, snow, freezing rain.

I happened to be driving last night trying to get home to beat the weather. Common sense says "you know what maybe I should just get home tonight". However people want to drive around and act like they have sense and then we have over 1,000 accidents in a few hours (that is the official figure).

I was driving the ES yesterday and it was utterly amazing the people riding my *** and using no signal and driving with no lights on and texting and talking on the phone. Of course an Acura TL was behind me on the freeway trying to somehow go through my car b/c I'm "in his way" when there are dozens of other cars in front of me all stuck in traffic.

The car slipped a couple times as I hit black ice on a back road a couple of times but luckily I wasn't going fast b/c (lightbulb) the conditions were horrible.

We had somewhere to go but we decided not to chance the weather, even if the RX is AWD. The other half is worrying about the idiots around.

Its utterly amazing this happens all the time here. There were so many accidents the police told people if no one was hurt, they were not responding. People just drive with no thought and get in accidents over a little cold. The entire area just goes MAD when there is a little bit of ice or even rain.

Sometimes I wonder so we share the same DNA? ANARCHY!!!!

PhilipMSPT

iTrader: (5)

That happens in California when it drizzles...

iRock

iTrader: (12)

That sounds pretty normal for my daily bay area traffic. I'm jelous if you have anything different

97-SC300

iTrader: (17)

Yeah..... even here people drive like complete morons as soon as it snows. By now you would think they should be used to it.

You got pics of your ES300?

mmarshall

Mike, what you are describing happens in many cities south of roughly the Mason-Dixon line (MD-PA) and the Ohio River, not just Atlanta.......especially with the first storm of the season. Get a inch or two of snow/sleet and everybody panics. Today, in D.C., we had an inch and a half of powdery fluffy snow (temps in the low 20s). Panic of the first-degree. Governments, schools, county buildings, grocery-shoppers, parents picking up kids......everybody hit the roads at once around noon, with their tires packing the snow into ice, before the salt trucks could even get done (and salt doesn't work well below about 24 degrees). Main roads were parking lots. RWD, low-profile-tire vehicles stuck in many places just spinning their tires, with people trying to push them out.

dunnojack

i'm just wondering.... why don't people carry mini shovels in their trunk and shovel themselves out ?

ABC

SOOOO true!

CDNROCKIES

Pussies!

lamar411

That's why i dont drive in the snow unless i have to. lot of idiots out there with no idea what the hell they are doing

<VENOM>

Heading home last night, I was driving slow and cautious, slowing down way before the light, approaching turns really slow, and all during this cars are riding my ***, with the lane open next to me, or they where passing me doing at least twice what I was.

AWD is not gonna do nothing except cost more to fix, ice is no traction

rdgdawg

NOTHING ever changes in ATL with regards to snow/black ice/sleet... and usually the northern transplants are the WORST offenders. You couldn't pay me enough when I lived there to go out on the streets after any frozen road issues

We STILL have solid ice all over the roads here after 5 days since our big storm... Atlanta would be PARALYZED

DrDrilZ

took me 5 hours to get home (usually a 45 min trip). all bridges and some were complete ice. i played bumper cars. at one point i was stopped with car in P and its began to slide into the car next to me.

Habious

We had an inch-and-a-half dusting here in the Washington DC area yesterday.

I guess conditions where just right because it STUCK! I mean really stuck good!

The SC430 stinks in the snow but this was particularly bad driving home last night.

I feel confident in my snow-driving abilities but, as for other folks on the road...watch out!

I got my driver's license in the snowy hills of West Virginia so, I've got some experience. However, I sometimes believe that, if you born and raised in a country that has NEVER seen snow, you should have some kind of special code put on your license that bans you from driving when the roads are white! You don't know what you're doing...get off the road!!!

I can't count the number of times when I've been trying to go up a hill and the person in front of me SLOWS DOWN as they approach the hill!

It's call "momentum", people...and it's your friend!

Lil4X

Snow is pretty rare in Texas, anywhere below the caprock (roughly south of the panhandle and western plains for you non-Texans). Still, like any unusual weather condition, you have to drive carefully - it's not just your driving, but that of every moron on the road that will cost you. When it snows, or rains after a long dry spell (allowing oil to build up on the road surface and transform into a nice grade of grease with a passing rain shower), I stay home. There's nothing out there I need so badly as to risk several thousand dollars' worth of damage to my car to procure.

As to the efficacy of 4WD or AWD, it works just fine in snow, but you're right - on ice, you're on your own. When I worked in Amarillo, I'd permanently traded company cars with our microwave engineer. What I got was a rolling embarrassment - a 4WD Chevy pickup decked out like a Tijuana taxi, with emergency lights, radios for every conceivable police agency and whip antennas sprouting from every flat surface with a dozen varieties of "Channel 7" and "Pro News" graphics. Subtle it was not.

It did, however, go where and when ever other vehicle in the fleet was immobilized in snowstorms. Some of our reporters with their similarly-dressed ponycars that served as news units would "brave" the weather and get themselves stuck in roadside ditches trying to drive unfamiliar roads . . . or where roads had been prior to the blizzard. My duty was to pull them out, and to my surprise, with a light touch on the throttle and judicious use of 4-L in the transfer case, there was nothing I couldn't drag back to solid ground. I developed a whole new respect for 4WD and owned several of my own after that experience.

It was also in that same panhandle town that I learned about ice. Driving my personal car - a fairly new Mustang - slowly down a slight downhill road in my neighborhood, I ran into a large patch of ice that suddenly left me a passenger with Sir Isaac Newton in the driver's seat. Other, more experienced winter drivers stopped and watched me execute a slow pirouette across four lanes and about a hundred feet into a shopping center parking lot where the car backed neatly into a parking space, precisely centered between the lines, and barely kissed the bump stop. Since I had become the center of attention of a growing crowd, I recovered by calmly exiting the car, locking the door and going shopping as though I'd planned the whole maneuver. Hope they didn't see my wobbly knees - it would have spoiled the whole effect.

mmarshall

With RWD and low-profile tires (even with electronic traction-aids), the problem, usually, is just a general lack of traction, not necessarily snow depth, shoveling, or clearing it out from under the wheels. When the weight of the drivetrain is not over the drive-wheels, a simple inch of snow (or ice), under some conditions, can be as bad as a foot.........you invariably pay a traction-penalty starting up from rest, electronics or not. RWD snow tires, of course, can help, but FWD and AWD are clearly better answers.
That, BTW, is one of the reasons I gave up my Lexus IS300 and now drive a Subaru, even though there were several other things I liked about the IS.