Rule #1 when driving in the winter: never hit the gas/break when you are on ice. You take your foot off the gas and off the brake. Turn into the skid, and the car will regain traction. Hitting the gas is what spun you out of control.
TimJames
4022
I think he meant cranking the wheel. You have to be ready to correct again when it catches the first time. Technically you should stay neutral on the gas or maybe even press the accelerator a small amount to transfer weight to the rear wheels, but that’s not easy to do naturally. Best thing to do is look far ahead, and slow down a bit given the conditions.
Sarkus
4023
When I was a kid my parents bought my brother and I a go-kart, which we proceeded for several years to race up and down a gravel road. I also learned to drive in climate where ice and snow were normal winter driving conditions. As a result, I have a pretty good innate skill when it comes to correcting for lost traction in a car.
However, most people don’t. It’s not really a skill you spend any time on if you take a drivers ed class. So most times people over-correct. Which was good in Demon’s case, apparently.
Brendan
4024
If it is any consolation I got hit by some 48 hour virus on the afternoon of the 25th and missed out on my father-in-laws yearly boxing day cricket match/braai get together. By the sounds of it it wasm’t as bad as yours but it did ruin my Christmas a little.
He’s a great driver. The road was literally fine, and he had just driven it to pick me up. Just an accident and nothing else. I know what to do in an ice situation as well. Just sometimes things can’t be avoided. I’m glad he did what he did, because it definitely saved my life.
And for the order, I would’ve hit the cliff on my right side as we slid and started sliding directly towards the right hand side, then he swung the wheel hard and the car caught and twirled around the other way (He drives a Pontiac G5 I think? Either way it’s a very light car). It spun around and through the fence and into the field.
Lucky any way you take it. It had nothing to do with his driving ability, and he was well within the speed limit, and like I said, it was raining but it wasn’t heavy rain and he ahd just driven that exact road an hour before.
Houngan
4026
And it’s also very, very hard to deal with an ice patch vs. a long sheet of ice, your rear end can kick out much farther than your front wheels can correct if all wheels suddenly hit good pavement, and that usually means a quick whip back across center and an overcorrection shoot like he experienced. Let’s all just be happy everyone is okay!
H.
Karen
4027
I’m always confused about this statement - light cars worse in bad weather.
Wouldn’t a lighter car be better stopping on ice? Inertia and all?
Leah_C
4028
Gary tried to kill my nephew. He instigated a sour pickle eating contest. He said he’d give my nephew and his friend $5 each if they could eat an entire sour pickle in 60 seconds with an additional $5 to the first to finish. End result: Devyn’s mouth was bleeding and tongue swollen by the last bite! He was happy to collect his $5 though, and go back for another pickle an hour later. Also, he insisted we put the video on youtube so he can be internet famous. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQIwFL-Apxo
Raife
4029
Their reactions are awesome, and it’s good to see Gary is continuing the spirit of the Whittalink.
Leah_C
4030
The dribbling and spitting cracks me up every time. My nephew was haaating it. The blonde kid seemed to really enjoy that pickle.
ZekeDMS
4031
Man, I just might try this with the Pickle in a Pouch at my old workplace.
Don’t have sour ones, though, but they do have hot ones. That oughta work. Of course, I’ll feel bad for giving two kids 88% of the recommended sodium intake for a 2000 calorie diet in one pickle, but eh, they’re kids, they’re resilient.
Pansies. I tear through sour pickles.
JonRowe
4033
Well, a lighter car is also pressing down on the road less hard, so it is easier for it to slip.
Houngan
4034
Logically it should always be the same since more friction is offset by more inertia, but the CW is really about distribution over the driving wheels. That’s why you load down the bed of a rear-wheel pickup in snow, all the weight is in the front, so the drive wheels can break loose much easier.
More bizarre than interesting. I got a weird Merry Xmas txt last Friday. Asked who the person was but they were being coy. It went on all day until they asked me what happened to my thumb and why it was in a bandage. My thumb was fine and I thanked them for the mystery Xmas game but it’s obviously a wrong number situation. On Saturday while drunk exploring I fell and bumped my noggin and popped my thumb pretty hard. It’s going to be in a little splint.
Houngan
4036
It’s not, really, in the final analysis. Your tires are inflated to X PSI, that’s how hard the tires are pressing on the road. The weight of the car just changes how much surface area is exerting that force. So (for convenience) a 1050lb car presses down at 35psi on 30 sq/in of tire surface, whereas a 3,500lb car presses down with 100 sq/in of surface, but each inch still only presses at 35psi. It’s what they call the “contact patch.”
Now here’s where the real physics boys come in, there is probably something to do with static vs. dynamic friction over the bigger surface area, I dunno how that affects it, but the larger patch probably resists the side force more readily due to static friction. I may be completely wrong about that, though.
H.
Wait, what? I thought PSI was an internal measure of how compressed the gas in the tire was, not a ratio of the square inches of contact-making tire relate to the weight of the care. You could inflate a tire to the desired PSI before it’s attached to the car, or while the car is on a lift, correct? So how does the weight of the car factor in?
Houngan
4038
Well, you have a balloon at a certain pressure, you put something heavy on it, it goes to a higher pressure or deforms. Since the tire constrains the tube, you get a larger or smaller flat spot on the bottom of the tire based on PSI vs. weight. If you inflate a tire to 35 psi on a lift, then lower the car, it’s going to increase pressure dramatically when the car weight settles on it, as the bottom deforms but the top is constrained by the outer tire.
Erm, won’t it? I swear this makes sense in my head, but now I’m starting to doubt myself. Gimme a sec while I test with my bike.
H.
Houngan
4039
Let me backpedal on that a bit, it seems that the rest of the tire can expand enough to compensate for the deflection at the bottom, so the PSI might maintain itself within reasonable weight parameters.
However, the PSI still works with the weight to determine the size of the contact patch, this I’m pretty sure about. That’s why you deflate your tires to get out of sand in the desert, it increases the surface area dramatically.
To answer your original objection more directly, it is indeed a measurement of the internal pressure of the gas, but remember that the pressure translates physically into “how much force per square inch on the outside do you need to move this?” Thus pressure vs. weight equals contact with surface. Were there no deflection of the tire (by overwhelming the PSI) and the tire were a theoretically perfect circle, then the contact patch would be infinitely small.
H.
I’ll totally agree with that. What I’ll argue is that the contact patch for larger, heavier cars is probably not only greater, but greater as a ratio of weight to surface area than on a lighter car. Might not be a lot more, but I bet it’s enough to make a difference.
