Portland, OR just recently got snow froze'd this last week, and I got in my car recently and I almost got in a wreck because the brakes didn't engage. They sounded fine and worked fine most of the drive, but at this point the brakes felt like they were slipping and grinding- I had them check within this year and was told they still had a lot of padding
- Sooo.. can the cold make my brakes mess up like that? Did they break? Should I bring it in -again-?
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It is always fun to watch the coastal and southern crowd try to drive on ice and snow...people should just stay inside if they don't have winter driving experience...
Posts: 571 | Registered: Mar 2001
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quote:Originally posted by lobo: It is always fun to watch the coastal and southern crowd try to drive on ice and snow...people should just stay inside if they don't have winter driving experience...
Its always fun watching Americans drive in the snow. Its so cute.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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My experience with ABS is that they engage without you having to stomp on them. If the car is slipping (one ice, usually) they kick on, and yeah, they do feel (and sound) like you're car is about to fall apart beneath you, but that's what they do.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Pepek, yeah, ABS can make a grinding noise, and can feel really strange compared to regular brakes. Slipping/grinding is pretty much what it feels like to me too. The slipping feeling is your brakes easing up to avoid locking, and the grinding noise is just the sound of the machinery that is intervening.
You can get this in slippery conditions without applying much force to the brakes. On ice, you should expect anything greater than feather pressure to engage the ABS. It might feel like the brakes aren't working properly but in reality the brakes are probably stopping you more effectively than if you didn't have ABS...if you locked your brakes you'd feel even more out of control. (Your near miss might have turned into a collision.)
If you're not convinced that ABS engagement is what happened I guess you could get your brakes checked, but I'm pretty certain that's what you experienced. If you get a chance to try it out in an empty, icy parking lot (with TONS of room for error) you could experiment with how much braking results in the same sort of behavior, and test icy patches against dry patches. repeat: tons of room for error. Don't experiment with testing the limits of your braking near any obstacles or hazards.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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In any icy (or snowy) conditions, I generally test my brakes with different intensities (of course, in an open lot or open road) just so I know what to expect if I really had to brake to avoid something.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Originally posted by The White Whale: In any icy (or snowy) conditions, I generally test my brakes with different intensities (of course, in an open lot or open road) just so I know what to expect if I really had to brake to avoid something.
lobo and mucus tease, but where I live it's snowy/icy several months out of the year, so everyone who lives here gets used to driving in the ice and snow, yet there's an annual adjustment period. The first few times each winter that roads are significantly icy or snowy, it's a circus. It seems like half the drivers become excessively cautious and drive as if they are 100% confident in having a collision and are just trying to minimize the kinetic energy when it happens. Another half seem to forget that conditions warrant slower speeds or greater allowances for stopping distance or both, and they cause many avoidable accidents. Of course not every driver fits either bucket - only a few drivers of each sort create the conditions where nobody's getting anywhere fast.
By the time we get to February, nearly everyone has made the required mental adjustments and traffic moves at a reasonable speed even when roads are slippery, and we don't have a ridiculous number of accidents. But it takes a while each year for everyone to make that adjustment.
So practice is good. The better you grok the handling of your vehicle on slippery roads, the better you can balance caution with speed. If you live in an area like mine, you'll get the practice sooner or later, but I like the idea of getting it in relatively controlled conditions.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Here in ID the roads are pure ice right now. We've had more than half a foot of snow since Saturday.
Funny thing was, I heard someone in the grocery store on Saturday telling the cashier she was from the Northeast and so she was used to this kind of weather. She followed that up by remarking that people in Idaho don't really know how to handle the snow and ice. I almost snorted.
Granted, the Northeast does get news coverage when they get bad weather.
I did my behind the wheel in about a foot of snow on the steep roads of Duluth, MN. I feel that my winter driving credentials are well established. Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
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You can actually get some fairly intense winter driving experience in California as well, if you ever go up into the Sierras, where there is quite a bit of ice and snow in winter. It's scary though- I hated to do it the once a year I had to to drive my sisters up for a ski trip. Plus, it's California, so it's pretty much nothing but weekend snow drivers, which means there are multiple accidents all the time up there.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Heck yeah. My region of NY has 7 of the top 10, and 10 of the top 15. You do not want to be out and about between Buffalo and Syracuse when the lake effect kicks in.
Posts: 1711 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Originally posted by lobo: It is always fun to watch the coastal and southern crowd try to drive on ice and snow...people should just stay inside if they don't have winter driving experience...
Or, you know, walk. Or take public transportation.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:Originally posted by lobo: It is always fun to watch the coastal and southern crowd try to drive on ice and snow...people should just stay inside if they don't have winter driving experience...
Or, you know, walk. Or take public transportation.
In cities that don't normally get snow and ice, I wouldn't trust bus drivers either. And I definately would NOT be out walking around with all the idiot drivers...
In fact, now that I think about it, everyone should stay inside!
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Walking isn't that bad. You just have to watch the dog-sleds when they're backing out in the parking lots. Getting run over by multiple feet really hurts.
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