Spinning out Front Wheels - What to do ?

PriusNeckBeard · Nov 1, 2016

Thumbs up - should be a sticky.
Thanks, Chap !

- PNB

PriusNeckBeard · Nov 1, 2016

ChapmanF said: ↑

I might have made it sound too exotic. There's really nothing that has changed about the technique since I was in driver training (which was a long time before there was ever a Prius). If you are on a surface that can accept no more than X torque to the wheels without the tires breaking free and spinning, your job as the driver is to deliver no more than about X torque. Otherwise you just turn your tires into snow and ice polishers, like this guy, which is counterproductive:

All the Prius changes is how easy it is, because you can just begin pushing the go pedal down slowly, a millimeter at a time, and have almost complete control of your torque to the wheels from near zero, ramping up gradually until something happens. In a conventional car, you could be stuck with too much torque unless you're really attentive to feathering the clutch and not killing the engine, and so on. No such fussing in a Prius, it's all just how far you press the go pedal.

So instead of looking like the ice polisher above, you want to look like one of these guys:

You can see in both those cases that they don't completely avoid breaking traction; they are powering right to the edge of the tires' grip, so there are little breaks in traction here and there, but none of the sustained polishing you see novices doing.

And in fact, keeping the torque right at that limit and correcting those brief slips is something you can trust the Prius traction control to do for you. Both of those drivers are probably just holding the go pedal at a constant, moderate position, and letting the traction control find the limit for them and do the fussy work.

The exact condition of your tires and the surface is what's going to determine your destiny. You'll end up moving exactly as fast as those conditions allow. How fast that is, you just have to find out in each situation.

There can be some situations where you simply don't have the traction you need. Those are the situations where no matter how gingerly you push down the go pedal, you never find any middle ground between nothing-happening and surface-polishing. When you find yourself in that situation, you just stop right away (before you've polished yourself into place until Spring thaw) and think about how to change the game. Dig some, or spread some sand, throw the floor mats down as Doug did, find somebody to push, etc.

But if you've got decent tires and control of your right foot, you should really rarely find yourself there.

In a Prius, no, not really. I was in reverse in my out-of-mud story, but that was just a consequence of the way I had parked. A quirk of the Prius is that only battery power is available in reverse, so if you have much distance to cover, you'll be better off forward ... or you might find yourself making intermediate stops while the engine tops up the battery again.

-Chap
Click to expand...

Perhaps best done in ECO mode.

PriusNeckBeard · Nov 2, 2016

Oops! I had missed Tideland's post #59.
He says it better than I did.
Great info, all !

Spinning out Front Wheels - What to do ?

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Spinning out Front Wheels - What to do ?

PriusNeckBeard Active Member

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