Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Test drive: Toyota Prius + snow

I'm going to give my 2007 Toyota Prius a test drive. After numerous warnings about how tough can Prius be in snow, it makes it even more interesting.

There are some people complaining that Prius shutting down the engine when the traction control system believes that it's too slippery around. Well, driving Prius in California doesn't give you too many chances to try this out, unless you'll get into very heavy rain and will press the right pedal to the floor. (Which I did, by the way. It didn't kill the engine for me, but dropped the impact of the accelration a lot.)

I'm heading north to Pine Mountain Club, CA. It's not the very snowy place (webcam), but I think that we're going to meet the snow this year. (While we didn't see any last year, but the year before I got stuck on 2003 Mitsubishi Outlander there.)

I am driving for about 10 years, the most time (except the last 3 years) I used to drive in places, where one can see snow for at least 2 months in a year (sometimes more, sometimes less). I used to drive all types of cars, either front wheel or rear wear. The rear ones can be really tough in snow for inexperienced person, especially in the time when they require extreme caution. (And they still sometimes a headache for me.) The front wheel driven cars are a little bit more intuitive, but can be as much dangerous as other ones.

So this is not the first time I'm challenging snow, but it's for the first time I'm going to drive the car with traction control (especially, with so many complains!). I'm pretty sure it's going to be a lot of fun, excluding the areas which are too narrow for even two cars at the same time. ;)

P.S. And definitely I'm going to carry the pair of snow cables in the back. I didn't get the fancy (SC Super Z6), but the basic ones (SC Radial). The 4x price difference scared me, but I'm going to reconsider this, as soon as I'll start visiting snow places more often.