I knew that would get your attention,
Today I encountered a skid while turning left at a light at 10 or 15 mph.
The car and I both ended up, safely, at a 90? angle basically, no harm no foul so I motored on carefully (I’m in KY where we just got a good deal of snow).
As soon as I knew the vehicle was out of control I simply left the steering wheel alone and got on the brakes. Not too pretty, but I don’t think I made it worse.
I was just curious what the generally accepted skid-response techniques are? I disagree with “steer into the skid” because what if the skid is in the direction of oncoming traffic, and you turn into the traffic and WHAM tires re-grip and you motor into oncoming ?
Share you techniques and experiences, please.
Steering into a skid is the normal practice if you still have the vehicle in somewhat control. But if you lose total control of the vehicle as you seem to indicate, it ain’t going to matter where you steer the vehicle.
Tester
Aim the front wheels where you want the car to go, regardless of what the car is doing. And pray.
If you’re in a front or 4WD, aim where you want to go and do some controlled and mild to moderate acceleration. Of course, that won’t work under all situations - like if you have no safe direction of travel at that time.
Front drive behaves differently than rear drive. With either, don’t brake in a corner unless you have antilock brakes. Braking is probably why you got sideways plus maybe going to fast. In winter you learn how fast you can go around snowy, icy or sanded corners. Like as when on a bike, you try to judge the road condition by its appearance.
Correcting for a skid is more likely to be something you do when trying to go straight ahead, not when rounding a slippery corner.
Stepping on the brakes is completely the wrong thing to do. So, take you and your car to the farthest reaches of a snowy parking lot and make it skid, then try turning the wheel the way the car is moving and stay on the gas, but gently. The car will straighten out. Practice in a safe, slippery place until you get the feel of it.
As has already been said, braking while sliding on a turn almost surely made the situation worse. More than anything, you probably just need practice in driving on snow. And, some winter tires would also be a good idea if you normally get significant snow.
Thanks for all the interesting input,
just to clarify,
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FWD, 2WD car
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I didn’t step on the brakes WHILE turning, I stepped on the brakes when it started skidding to at least try to dissipate some energy. There wasn’t anything around to worry about slamming into, anyway.
Hi Jeff! Go practice in an empty parking lot . . . seriously . . . you’ll have fun and learn how to turn out of a skid, how to stop on snow, and so forth. We "Northerners"learned to drive on snow, but you “Southerners” need a bit of practice. I usually turn into the skid and try to drive through it, but that wouldn’t work if you had something in your lane of travel. Still driving the Accord? Rocketman
Thanks Rocketman,
I’m in Louisville, the southern most northern city / northern most southern city, so I don’t know what I am! But I’m not used to driving in snow honestly. We get a significant dumping here only occasionally in the winter.
Yup Accord going strong. Were you aware that I replaced the '87 with a '99 ?
My next beer will be drank to you.
I live in North Dakota and have some experience driving in snow and ice. Most of the time when encountering ice the ONLY option is to stay off the brakes, shift into neutral,and steer out of trouble. On one particular occasion my wife and I were approaching a red traffic light with one car stopped at the light ahead of us. I noticed the polished glaze of ice on the road surface and tried the brakes with no result, in fact I think we started to slide faster toward the stopped car ahead of us. I quickly shifted our Mitsubishi Montero into 4-wheel drive, turned the front wheels hard to the left, stomped on the gas and swung the Montero into the oncoming lane facing back the way we had just come and at a complete stop. This avoided a collision with not only the vehicle ahead of us, but also cars parked along the side of the road. Of course we were lucky that there was no oncoming traffic. My wife’s comment - “Way to go Mario!” Alternately I would have steered to the curb or even onto the boulevard to avoid a certain collision if there were no parked cars in the way. Key to any recovery from sliding out of control is to immediately take your foot off the gas and in icy conditions you can also greatly benefit by placing the vehicle into neutral before you begin cornering, and especially when using your brakes to come to a stop, to disengage the drive wheels because even when you take your foot off the gas the drive wheels will continue to pull.
One more tip. If you need to swing your front wheel drive car around as we did, you need to depress the button on your park brake lever and then pull the lever up to get the rear end to slide and swing while turning the wheel in the direction you want to spin and give it the gas. This requires some practice.
Thanks Jeff! Good luck with your '99 . . . didn’t know that you got it. Cheers! Rocketman
As long as you live in Kentucky you are not going to drive in enough snow to get good at it. Telling you how to do it won’t help,you don’t have time when a skid happens to think through the process. It has to become “muscle memory”. If you seriously want to learn, go to a high performance driving school with a skid pad. I taught all my kids in a large, empty snow covered parking lot but where are you regularly going to find that in Kentucky ?