Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:51:42 -0800
Reply-To: Scott Daniel - Shazam <scottdaniel@TURBOVANS.COM>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Scott Daniel - Shazam <scottdaniel@TURBOVANS.COM>
Subject: Re: Subject: Re: SNOW CALL
In-Reply-To: <159070990801231815k25cc9bd0v5cd9be5a07663a0c@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hmmmm............i see.
For one thing .........how dry or wet the snow/packed snow/ice is matters a
lot.
Dry very cold packed snow has great traction.
Wet slushy stuff can be awful. Gernally, the colder and dryer the better,
the wetter the worse.
People in North Dakota or Alaska drive all winter just fine, where it's very
cold and pretty dry.
Tires, tires make all the diff in the world.
I put Bridgestone Blizzack studless winter tires on my turbo Volvo sedan -
2wd, ......just awesome.
FWD .....I can image it's working better for you in slippery conditions.
It's odd, it's really not better per se, but might work a lot better for
most people in many situations.
The real advantage of FWD, traction wise, comes from have a much higher
percentage of the car's mass on the driving wheels - all the heavy
mechanicals are over the driving the wheels.
And they do sort of 'follow the road' automatically in a way.
But there are no FWD dedicated racing or rally car ( or barely any ) nor any
FWD motorcycles. Any serious performance car is AWD or RWD, they can do
much more, but require more raw driving skill than FWD also. You sure
can't power slide a FWD car through a corner, that's for sure. Or get it to
four wheel drift unless you simultaneously left foot brake in corners, but
that's performance driving , as in race track, driving, not just trying to
get around safely in the winter.
I've driven jillions of snow, ice, and packed snow miles in a 2WD TD
vanagon just fine. Barely ever use chains even. Got 30 mpg in snow with
chains on once too, since I hardly use much throttle half the time, in
slippery conditions anyway.
Scott
www.turbovans.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of
robert feller
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 6:15 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Re: Subject: Re: SNOW CALL
snow yes, more slippery conditions in the North East...NO! My 2wd was fine
on snow with some friction (as far as rear wheel drives go) but when it got
icy or very slippery snow it was crap.
It's relative...they don't compare to AWD or FWD under some conditions but
are better then a 2WD pickup truck with no weight on the back. Still doesn't
make a great solution where I live. Spun out in corners all the time if
extreme caution was not taken. I'd take FWD any day of the week over my 2WD
Westy.
On Jan 23, 2008 8:21 PM, mad madeline <mac10wv@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I take issue with the comment that 2WD are not good in snow!! I went all
> over the place in snow... in Washington State. Even treked across an area
> one time that was over two feet deep and it has always amazed me how well
> the van handled it. Didn't slip and never got stuck. I did have Nokia
snow
> tires :) Madeline
>
> ---------------------------------
> Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.
>
--
Shawn Feller
Ohio
www.carboncow.com
| 
