We’ve recently had rather a lot of weather. Snow to be precise.
The Car
Snow isn’t usually a big deal here not least of all because they’ve got the hang of it so usually fairy diggers come to scrape the roads off before you need to go anywhere. Of course people do drive EVEN worse than usual in the snow (clue: when your wheels are spinning, ease OFF the accelerator) but you just give them a really wide berth. So the other day when woke up to all the snow, I didn’t think it would cause much of a problem. Wrong.
What I’d always thought of as a mostly flat driveway might as well have been Everest with snow on it. Particularly when that snow has been compacted by several tons of German engineering (Vorsprung durch Gewicht). The thing is, you don’t get any traction when the car’s size zero weight is distributed over massive tyres. And the rear wheel drive doesn’t make it any easier. Ok it isn’t a secret that this isn’t a winter car but I only needed to move it 10 metres onto a cleared road where it would have been fine. After much digging and even resorting to chemical heat I gave up and spent the next 2 days as a pedestrian.
During those two days I realised that what I really needed was snow chains – but that’s crazy if you only need them for your own drive …..which is when I realised the true genius of US school busses.
When you look at the back of a school bus – for instance when you are trapped behind them for ages as they crawl along, not allowing overtaking, as they drop each chubby child off at his or her own letterbox – you see all these dangling chains underneath. I always thought they were for strapping useful things to the bottom of the bus; such as tools, spare wheels, unruly children etc. It turns out that these are brilliant automatic snow chains. When they are needed they are sort of dangled in front of the wheels to provide traction and then they just hang out of the way when it isn’t needed. I think we need those on the Lotus. Metal chains would be too heavy – so maybe cute little carbon fibre ones. Am I on to something?