Driving in Snow and Ice: The Techniques That Actually Work

Almost everything that goes wrong on snow comes from asking the tyres for two things at once, or asking for anything suddenly.

Driving in snow and ice is less about skill than about smoothness and timing. The techniques are simple, they are counterintuitive in one or two places, and they work far better than confidence does.

The one principle underneath all of it

A tyre has a limited amount of grip and it has to share that between accelerating, braking and turning. On dry tarmac there is plenty to go round. On snow there is very little, so asking for two things simultaneously is what uses it up.

That is why almost every piece of winter driving advice reduces to the same instruction: do one thing at a time, and do it gently. Brake in a straight line before the corner, not in it. Straighten the wheel before accelerating. Never brake and steer hard together if you can avoid it.

Everything below is that principle applied to specific situations.

Getting moving

Wheelspin is not just ineffective, it actively makes things worse by polishing the snow under the tyre into ice.

• Use the gentlest throttle that produces movement, and be prepared for that to feel absurdly light.
• On a manual, pulling away in second gear reduces the torque reaching the wheels and often works where first will not.
• Many automatics and modern cars have a winter or snow mode that does the same thing. Use it.
• If the wheels spin, stop and try again more gently rather than trying harder.
• Rocking gently forwards and backwards can build enough movement to escape a rut, but stop before it becomes spinning.

The instinct to apply more power when nothing happens is the wrong one every time, and it is what turns a five-minute delay into a stuck car.

Stopping

Stopping distances on snow and ice are dramatically longer than on wet tarmac, and the gap you leave is the single most valuable thing you bring.

Leave far more room than feels necessary, and think of it as time rather than distance. Brake early, gently and progressively, and where possible slow by easing off and letting engine braking do some of the work rather than applying the brakes at all.

If your car has anti-lock brakes and you have to stop hard, press firmly and hold. The pedal will vibrate and grind, and that is the system working rather than a fault. Do not pump the pedal; that defeats it.

Worth knowing what anti-lock brakes do and do not do. They keep the wheels turning so you can steer while braking, which is genuinely valuable. They do not shorten stopping distances on snow and can lengthen them, so they are not a substitute for the gap.

Corners, hills and the awkward bits

Three situations where the principle gets specific.

On corners, all the slowing happens before you turn in. Enter slower than you think you need, keep the steering inputs small and steady, and accelerate only once the wheel is coming back to straight.

Going uphill, build momentum before the slope and try not to change gear or lift halfway up, because both interrupt the traction you have. Leave a large gap to the car ahead so you are not forced to stop on the gradient, which is the hard place to restart.

Going downhill, get into a low gear before you start descending and let the engine hold the speed. Braking on a slippery descent is a much worse position than arriving at it slowly.

If it does start to slide

The correct responses are all about removing the demand rather than adding a correction.

1. Come off the throttle smoothly. Do not lift abruptly, which shifts weight and can make it worse.
2. Do not brake hard, because that adds a demand the tyres cannot meet.
3. Look where you want the car to go, not at what you are trying to avoid. Your hands follow your eyes.
4. If the back steps out, steer gently in the direction it is sliding and unwind as it comes back.
5. If the front pushes wide, easing off and straightening slightly restores grip better than adding more steering, which just scrubs.

The single most common mistake is more steering. A tyre that has lost grip does not regain it because you turned the wheel further, and the extra angle becomes a problem the moment grip returns.

What tyres do, and what four-wheel drive does not

This distinction is worth being blunt about because the confidence it creates causes real incidents.

Four-wheel drive helps you accelerate. It puts power down through four contact patches instead of two, which is genuinely useful for getting moving and getting up a hill. It does nothing whatsoever for stopping or steering, because both of those use all four wheels regardless of which ones are driven.

Winter tyres help with all three. The compound stays flexible at low temperatures where a summer tyre hardens, and the tread is designed to bite into snow. A two-wheel-drive car on winter tyres will out-stop and out-corner a four-wheel-drive car on summer tyres, and it is not close.

If you have to choose one, choose the tyres. Where winter tyres are legally required, that requirement is usually tied to the snowflake marking on the sidewall rather than to the word winter in a product name.

Before you set off

Clear all the glass, the mirrors, the lights and the roof, not a porthole. Snow left on the roof slides onto the windscreen at the first firm stop, exactly when you least want it.

Then give yourself more time than the journey needs. Almost every winter mistake is made by someone running late, and time is the one thing on this page that costs nothing and helps with everything.