.
It has been said many times before, but I am going to say it again;
why is this country so rubbish at coping with a little bit of snow?
It's not like its unusual, it snows every year, some times a lot sometimes
little, but either way it always snows. SO why is everyone always so
bloomin surprised? Are they also surprised by Christmas, or new year?
'gosh, there is a Christmas this year, didn't see that one coming!'
I like snow, I like driving in the snow, driving the BMW is hilarious
fun but gets a bit wearing if I actually want to get to my destination,
so I have been using my Land Rover a lot and its just fantastic. There
is nothing quite like the pleasure of driving a deserted road on fresh
crisp snow, its better than Santa's grotto any day.
But it's not just roads that are effected adversely, airports have been
closed and even trains have broken down even though it never got much
below -20, to put that into context cars are tested as standard by manufacturers
down to -40 and expected to work perfectly.
When I lived in southern Germany we would get six inches of snow every
night during the winter and everything went on as normal, I drove ordinary
cars such as Audi A6/ A4 and even a Fiat Punto and I never got stuck,
just used ordinary winter tyres and got up a few minutes early to dig
the drive out and brush all the snow off the car.
But in the UK people clear just a small hole from the windscreen and
try to drive off, unable to see out the side or rear and oblivious to
other road users, dropping great lumps of snow of their roof on every
corner onto oncoming traffic. Idiots.
And its strange that here we don't understand winter tyres, we expect
a tyre designed to cope with the hot dry road surfaces of high summer
to magically change compound and design to cope with rain and snow.
In many European countries it is normal to have a second set of wheels
in the shed with winter tyres on, insurance companies will not cover
you if you have the wrong ones on making it effectively a legal requirement.
If you have never used a set of winter tyres then it will come as a
bit of a revelation, they grip on ice and snow enough to make journeys
safe and relatively easy if you take things steady, what's not to like?
Someone perfectly demonstrated this problem to me recently. I was driving
down a nice snowy B road when an Audi Quatro pulled out of a T junction
in front of me, He pulled out with some gusto and the 4wd system gave
him remarkable thrust on the slippery surface, but his summer sports
tyres had very little grip and as he tried to turn the car simply span
into the opposite ditch. I know it's wrong, but I couldn't help laughing.