First snow drive in the Prius

I drove my Prius in a snow storm today for the first time. It did a pretty good job, considering. I’ve never had a car with traction control before, and Vicki has frequently complained that hers doesn’t allow her to get out of the driveway when the snow is bad. I didn’t have that problem, but there was one point where a pickup truck in front of me fishtailed badly on some snow that I just sailed through. Sure, there were times when the car didn’t react to the accelerator, but it kept going straight and didn’t get stuck.

In other news, I decided to reboot my colo box for the first time in 327 days (I checked the uptime before) because I got a new libc-xen. Of course, being that long between reboots, it had to fsck every file system before it would boot, so that took some time.

And in other other news, the right shift key on my laptop is getting balky. I’m going to have to see if i can pry it off and clean out whatever is lodged under it.

6 thoughts on “First snow drive in the Prius”

  1. In the geekery theme, uptimed is cute. I lost my 195 day uptime on my desktop after it didn’t resume from hiberation this week.

  2. I don’t think I’ve pushed my right shift key on any computer I’ve owned in years. I instinctively always use the left one.

  3. If you read your manual, it more than likely tells you to disable the TCS in snow (all the vehicles I’ve owned with TCS (two Saturns, a Caravan, and a BMW) had/have this in their manuals). Snow and ice is about the only condition where traction control loses more than it wins.

  4. Jamie, nope, not for Priii. I checked this out thoroughly a couple of years ago when I first had problems with this. Can’t turn it off.

    It’s a pain.

  5. Odd. Our Montana minivan has traction control as well and there is a centrally located switch to disable and re-enable it. Like others I’ve found it handy at times, but a bit of a PITA at other times. Being able to turn it on and off quickly is a big plus.

  6. According to the PriusChat forums, disabling the traction control can burn out the electric motors and the hybrid transmission. Obviously not a problem with a Montana.

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