Just need to vent...

The car washes both close from December to February. I'm not sure if spraying water would work. Maybe if it were hot enough. When the car washes are open at the begining and end of winter I've sprayed onto the car and it just freezes into a sheet of ice, perhaps melting a little on the area it's directly spraying, but overall just creates more ice.

With lakes here getting up to a couple feet of ice any reservoir outside will freeze solid.

 

Customers swap things around constantly and put things in vacant spots. My Wallie people offer no explanation and I move on. Has happened to me many times, “that’s not the one on sale sir”

 

Yea - ya gotta only spray inside the wheel wells. And if you use a portable warm water reservoir, you can't leave it outside if there's still water in it. It's the same reason we don't fill our dog's outside water bowls.

We have a couple indoor type car wash conveyors that use warm water that gets all the salt and frost off the bottom of our cars. The one we use offers an unlimited use monthly plan. In winter - we drive through there at least once a week.
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Thanks for the tips. But I don't see there being a good solution here. The amount of water needed would be tremendous, and then where would we do it? In the driveway? I'm already battling mounds of snow and ice out there. Even if there were a conveyor belt type car wash here, I don't see that even scratching the surface as to getting the ice off. When I have inches of solid ice packed all around my tires at all-day-long, sub-zero temps the only thing that will get rid of that is picking it off with a hammer and chisel.

Simply put, the fabric wheel wells are just a terrible car design for bitter cold, snowy climates. I wished I had noticed them before buying the Avalon, as I probably wouldn't have gotten it. I definitely will never buy another car with fabric wheel wells ever again.

 

I believe vastly more people drive in conditions closer to +36 than -36 °F, but either don't understand the fogging issues associated with recirculation, or don't think about it until visibility is significantly impaired. I witness this frequently when riding with others, sometimes doing the switching myself if within reach.

 

DO they make aftermarket wheel well liners for the Avalon in your year range that are not .....fabricated?

My truck is a near-base model and thus came without liners for the rear.
Small price to pay being able to buy a $35,000 truck instead of the $50,000 model I figure, but interestingly enough my CFO was bugged enough about it to warrant a search on my part. $100 for vinyl.

Aftermarket truck pieces-parts are more plentiful than Avalon parts by far but I DID see one listing for a 2010.....$49.

 

I found some aftermarket liners for the front, but it's the rear ones that are some sort of felt type of cloth or fabric, and I don't see any for those. Maybe I should look harder.

Thanks, but no thanks. My car budget is still $10,000 max. And at 40 mpg I'm spending enough already for fuel. I don't need no gas-guzzling, oversized, overpriced, get-my-groceries-wet truck just to get rid of cloth wheel well liners.

 

Local grocery occasionally goes through the produce department putting special yellow tags under certain items.

The yellow tags prominently show a discounted price that is only available if you use the store's track-my-purchases card.

The actual price is hidden in the top left corner of the card in maybe 9-point type.

I adjust my shopping lists on the spot to buy the items they have not tagged that way.

 

I use Firefox as my PC browser, set to as private as I can make it, which probably isn't much.

My phone I use Chrome, mostly because that's what came with it.

 

I installed Firefox Focus on my phone. Has high security with the blockers built in and auto wipes history when you completely close it. Only use Chrome for the sites I want to see that Focus won't let me.

 

Man, do not miss driving in four seasons... dodges thrown tomato

Wasn't raised in it... but did have to live in two formative places winters aren't theoretical: Bavaria, and D.C... thus had to learn quickly. I'd say taking my int'l mil licence road test in a HMMWV, down narrow German streets, under stone arches inches from the windscreen frame, in February... then driving a MAJ and LTC around the rest of the winter, no other training... was some crucible. But that's mil life for you.

I used to say common sense removes 80% of getting stuck when it freezes (much like driving off-road). But the other stuff you're bound to exp -- like changing a tire in slush, that's been bashed one too many times on curbs so the bead goes... or the sticky sugary crap WA used to spread vs. salt, and how that completely blocks a motorcycle's radiator fins until you find a source of hot water somehow... or when to use studs and when cable chains will work fine, and why -- are all coming sooner or later. All these things, you're usually up to your elbows in it, to learn the lesson. And there were a lot of these, my German & Canadian friends / coworkers would offer sympathetically, to this 'casual', relatively-noob winter driver

But as in another post, made it through 5 winters in PNW, driving some months 50+ mi a day barely keeping undercarriage off the snow, on ASRs -- first exp which, was moving there w/ 500 lbs of my crap in that same Paseo, driving over the Siskyous deep winter. So some of us get lucky, I guess. But luck tends to follow common sense

 

I use Edge, but I also dislike how much Microsoft self-advertises. Every time Edge updates it has to open up to a big welcome screen and a tutorial of all the new features that came with the update.

Me: I just want to go to my website. I don't need to know what AI features and whatnot are now part of the web browser. Do I really have to hit a skip button every month?

Chrome seems to use more RAM.
Firefox seems to use more RAM and is incompatible with some of my websites I visit. If it weren't I'd probably use Firefox instead of Edge.

I tend to have sympathy for those who admit they are new to the snow and at least listen to those of us who have decades of training and experience.

It seems a lot of people watch a few YouTube videos, which seen to be just advertisements for AWD vehicles, get up to their elbows in debt with a fancy new SUV or pickup, and then think they know it all and have everything it takes to brave the winter. Next thing you know, I'm coming along to help them get unstuck.

 

Desktop Samsung browser is pretty new, but it definitely does the trick, security wise.

 

For me, MS-Edge and Chrome only for sites that won't work on Firefox (with several add-ons that block some things). No Bing.

 

The military tended to train into us (well, those with a brain cell firing anyway), thinking you know it all as a noob, leads to harsh lessons... so behooved keeping trap shut and ears open. Served me well enough, along with a healthy bit of paranoia driving checking / rechecking stuff before a critical outing (literally saving my life several times). But any old hand at doing something requiring real skill, knows no amt of good intention can replace experience.

Think the last real endeavor I'd poured effort into, where honestly thought time-in-svc could be leapfrogged, was the current gig of bodyworker. Oh, I can out-do my mentor in a couple years, no problem -- after all, have <this> amt of time doing xx and yy, should be a cakewalk. Ehht, you're a no-go at this station, and this one too, ad nauseum. That was 15 yrs ago... and hopefully 15 yrs from now, staying a student will let me reach a football pitch closer to the masters in this field, miles down the path.

Deep-tissue bodywork... mentor even said, start of apprenticeship "there's an exchange that happens when you put your hands on the client and seek to change what it's doing (resorting to pain / lack of function). You'll have no idea what the f*** that means, until you're at least 7 yrs into the job". Right? That's the same reaction I had -- 'okay old man, whatever... let's get started'. But lo and behold year 7, arsehole poking out 6" from my body, highly-struggling to work the giant knots out of an arborist's legs in 90F heat for 3 hrs... something clicked. Ah... that's how you do it. Haven't had those struggles since.

Not saying learning to drive in snow requires that kind of 'woo-woo' esoterica... but learning snow myself, have been a lot of 'ah-ha' moments, sidestepping so much trouble and effort and spending doing it this way, or buying that more expensive thing vs. the cheaper thing many times (steelies w/ snows, vs. getting stuck and needing pulled out?). Same with learning to be a powersports tech. Same w/ rising through the ranks in the military. Some things, you just need your arse caved in... and figure out a solution from having reached your limit, doing it wrong. This also teaches a healthy bit of humility and gratitude, when people who're where you want to be smarts-wise, reach out their hand to help this poor slob of a noob

Because no one gets to skip that stage... and those who can't be bothered, are demanding you let them find out the hard way. And tbh, you should let them. After all, you offered

 

And that makes sense.

It's when they treat me as if I know nothing about the snow that's a real pain. I'm the one who studied the subject reading entire books on car dynamics. I'm the one who took several courses of how to drive on snow, ice, mountains, etc. I'm the one who has driven pretty much every kind of vehicle in this area, from small econo cars, to pickups to large commercial trucks and buses, from AWD, to 4WD to FWD to RWD to rear-engine -both big and small-, to front-engine, to mid-engine, from automatics, to manuals, to three-on-the-tree, to non-synchronized manuals, from putting chains on just two tires, to putting chains on all 4 tires, to driving through snow for 15 hours, non-stop, to driving through deep snow, to coming up to a corner with black ice and going around it, seeing all the cars rolled down at the bottom of the hill, to having 14 SUVs and pickups come up and pass me in my little FWD car with summer tires, and all 14 slide off the road right in front of me.

I might have not seen it all or done all, but I'm not too far from it. Then some young punk comes up and tells me, "That's not how that works." or, "You should do it this way."