My Annual SUV and Snow Tire Rant

As we have our first snow of the season (well, there was that freak Halloween storm, but Boston saw virtually none of it), and as I had my annual experience of driving carefully in the right lane of Rt 95 and having an SUV blow past me doing 80, only to see it off in the median strip a few miles ahead, it must be time for my annual SUV and snow tire rant.

Ah, how things have changed from six years ago. I see far fewer Ford Expeditions being used as single-passenger commuting vehicles, and not all that many being used as soccer mom cars. This is good.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of the zealots who ran around surreptitiously pasting I’m Changing the Climate! bumper stickers onto SUVs. I don’t view them as a social evil. How could I? I’m a car guy. But I’ve always felt that the public was sold a bill of goods that these were vehicles with the right balance of features to be good daily drivers.

Look. Any car is a compromise of cost, performance, dry handling, snow handling, safety, space, cache, fuel economy, fun, and other factors. Every once in a while one of these levers gets bumped up to eleven in importance, and that throws a car out of balance. Need to carry huge quantities of people? 15-passenger van. Fastest squirt for the least bucks? Corvette ZR1. Think you need to drive over boulders? Hummer. Gas goes to five bucks a gallon? Prius. Gas goes to five bucks a gallon but you don’t want to shell out 20 large for a new car? Twelve-year-old Geo Metro. But are any of these a reasonable compromise for the myriad of things that most people need daily driver for? Actually, of these, the Prius comes closest, but I digress.

For many years, for many families, the solution to the equation of balance was the good old-fashioned American station wagon. It swallowed kids and cargo even if it came up was woefully short on handling, fuel economy, and cache. When Chrysler popularized the “garage-able” minivan with a flat floor, a walk-though interior, and seating for seven in the 1980s, they sold like hotcakes because families thought this represented the right balance. Plus, compared with a big rear wheel drive station wagon, the minivan’s front wheel drive was perceived by many to be better in snow. We’ll get back to this in a moment.

During the primacy of the station wagon and the ascendancy of the minivan, it’s not that people weren’t driving four wheel drive vehicles. Pickup trucks, Jeeps, and Suburbans had been available for 50 years, there were two-door specialty vehicles like the Ford Bronco and Chevy Blazer, and Subaru had quietly built a reputation for four wheel drive passenger cars and wagons. But the Subarus were comparatively small, and the other vehicles were, well, trucks; they certainly weren’t soccer mom cars. However, when Ford introduced the Explorer in 1990, it lit the match that started the SUV craze because of its widely-reported car-like ride and handling, the presence of four doors instead of two, four wheel drive helping to protect you from getting stuck in the snow, ample cargo space, a high vantage point (I’ve never quite understood the popularity of this), and the well-marketed aura of safety. The combination of these factors resulted in first-year sales of over 420,000 units. Chevrolet, in response, made sure that the next version of their Suburban introduced in 1992 was less of a truck and more “car-like.”

Now, I’ve got nothing against SUVs. I’ve owned six Suburbans and a Toyota Land Cruiser. For years I’d buy one in the spring, sort out any issues it had, use it to take the family to Nantucket, then sell it in the fall. I preferred the big, truck-like pre-1992 ones with a bench seat across the front. Those had seat belts for nine people. I could go on vacation with my family of five and my brother-in-law’s family of four and have all of us pile in, belt in, and drive out on the sand to go fishing. When I found a rust-free ‘Burb that was a steal, I held onto it for seven years. Then I had the Land Cruiser for three years. But I only registered them during the summer. Neither Maire Anne nor I ever wanted to be driving a vehicle that big that got such poor gas mileage the rest of the year, four-wheel drive or no.

I suppose it’s understandable that, while gas was cheap, many families thought that SUVs had the right balance of features. I just was never one of them. When my kids were younger, I always thought that, unless you live in a climate where there’s so much snow and you live on such an unpaved boulder-strewn road that four-wheel drive and high ground clearance are true necessities, the minivan is a better compromise. It’s a lighter vehicle so fuel economy is better, and the layout with the flat floor makes it much easy to put a third row of seats into. It’s only the largest SUVs that have a third row of seats, and now you’re driving six thousand pounds. Now that the kids are out of the house, a small station wagon fits the bill for me.

Of course, the size and weight of full-sized SUVs, instead of being a detriment, was marketed as a safety factor, and in particular was cynically marketed toward women who were manipulated to feel that they and their children “just weren’t safe” unless they were driving a three-ton vehicle. With a wink and a nod, the message was “you and I both know that in a full-sized SUV you’re bigger than anyone else; you’ll crush them before they crush you.” I strongly object to this perversion of safety. I’ll go further. I think it’s unethical to market and sell (and, perhaps, to buy) a vehicle if the intent is for your increased safety to come at the expense of someone else.

One can dissect the “how safe are SUVs” question along many axes. There are data that show that SUVs have higher occupant fatality rates than cars, and that a very high percentage of rollover fatalities occurs in SUVs because of their high center of gravity. The point is that safety is more complex than simply being the biggest vehicle on the road.

Factoring into this is the misconception of how much safety four wheel drive actually buys you. Many folks living in New England will tell you that, when it’s snowy, SUVs are the cars you’re most likely to see spun off into the median strip. Not 4wd pickup trucks, mind you – SUVs. You know why? Because most people driving pickup trucks do not confuse them with sports cars, whereas many people driving an SUV seem to think that this car that is top-heavy and does not handle particularly well in the dry suddenly transforms into a freaking Lamborghini when it is slick out.

This is important. Let’s break it down further. Driving in snow has three main components: 1) getting underway, 2) keeping underway, 3) turning, and 4) stopping. I will certainly agree that four-wheel drive helps you with the first. In deep snow, it will help you with the second. But it does not help you with the third or the fourth. The scariest vehicle I ever drove in the snow was a gigantic 1993 Ford F350 four-door pickup with four-wheel drive. Most people would look at the truck and think, oh baby, nothing could stop this thing in the snow. And that’s about right… nothing could stop it. With the four-wheel drive and high ground clearance, snow banks posed little problem while parking. Hell, other cars posed little problem while parking. But if you were headed downhill on a slick surface, heaven help you. All that weight created a lot of momentum. The car wouldn’t turn. The car wouldn’t stop. It was frightening.

It’s the lack of direct warning and feedback that’s a problem. Before the 80s, nearly all American cars had rear wheel drive and a big heavy engine in the front. With so little weight over the drive wheels in the back, these cars were not great in the snow. People who lived in snowy climates understood that you had to put snow tires on the back wheels (preferably on all four wheels) and weight in the back, and then they worked pretty well. Most folks over a certain age remember how much fun it used to be to take a rear wheel drive car to an empty parking lot, hit the gas, and have the back end spin around. Wheeeee! Wheeeee! This was, in fact, how you learned to control a car in a skid. You’d practice it. They even taught it in driver’s ed. “Turn your wheels in the direction of the skid.” That never made any sense either. You had to feel it. But that twitch of the back end in a rear wheel drive car – the tail starting to slide around – is a canary in a coal mine, telling you that conditions are slick. So you know. So you back off.

When Japanese cars started selling in droves in the 70s and 80s, most of them had front wheel drive, putting the weight of the engine over the drive wheels. This improves traction in snow. Plus, since the front wheels do the steering as well as the propelling, when you hit the gas on a front wheel drive car in the snow, the back end stays where it is; it doesn’t swing out like on a rear wheel drive car. Most people prefer that. These two factors – combined with the introduction of so-called “all-season radials” – form the basis of the conception that front wheel drive cars are “better” in the snow. It’s not that they’re “better;” it’s that, all other factors being equal, they have a weight distribution making it less likely that the back end will come around. The problem is that your coal mine has lost its canary. I like that twitch in the back end of a car that tells me “it’s slippery; be careful.” In contrast, in a front wheel drive car, often the first indication you have of lack of traction is when you try to turn, and instead of the front wheels biting in, the car just slides into something.

This by-the-time-you’re-sliding-it’s-too-late problem is magnified in four-wheel drive cars. They certainly do better at the getting-you-underway part. By propelling all four wheels, they do better at the keeping-you-underway part, and if you have to drive a lot on unplowed rutted roads, this is genuinely useful. But they do nothing special at the turn-in part or at the stopping-you part. Antilock braking systems (ABS) and traction control certainly help, but all other factors being equal, when you’re in an SUV and you need to stop in slippery weather, you’re in a bigger heavier vehicle, you have more momentum, and that makes you worse off – not better off – than if you were in a smaller lighter vehicle. Add to that the fact that the four-wheel drive, the ABS, and all that steel around you lull many people into a false sense of security.

I’ve been driving BMWs year-round for 30 years. In the winter, I’ve always put snow tires (usually Bridgestone Blizzaks) on all four corners. When I used to drive a BMW 2002 over the winter, I’d put studded snow tires on all four corners. These days I’m driving a 2001 325XiT all-time all-wheel-drive wagon. It came equipped with all-season radials. Whether ASRs are fine in the snow depends on the conditions. If they're new all-season radials and the snow is light, they may be fine. But all factors being equal, they'll never give the bite of a real snow tire whose rubber compound and tread are designed specifically for snow. In the fall, I decided to look around for a set of steel wheels and snow tires. In addition to wanting the snows, I wanted the steel wheels in order to keep the 325's nice alloy wheels from being destroyed over winter potholes. I found a set of steel wheels with Continental snows advertised cheaply on Craigslist in “like new” condition. But when I checked them out, one pair of tires had 8/32” tread left (good) but the other pair had only 5/32” (nearing the end of their useful life). You know how it goes… I was there… they were cheap… I bought them and threw them on the car, putting the better set on the back and the worse set on the front to equalize the wear.

Today was my first chance to try them, and the all-time all-wheel-drive 325XiT wagon, out in the snow.

Horrible.

It reminded me of that old F350 pickup. The car, with its all-time all-wheel-drive, had no problem going up and down hills, but stopping on slick surfaces and negotiating turns on unplowed entrance ramps were just terrible. New snow tires, at least for the front, are clearly in order.

So, remember: The 4wd in your SUV may help you to get out of the plowed-in parking space, but without tires (preferably snow tires) with decent tread, it’s very easy to be surprised when you need to turn or stop. And even if you have new Blizzaks... slow down, will ya?