My favorite local weatherman is usually right when he predicts storms so I took his word that it wasn't going to start snowing until 3-4PM today. I had an appointment at 12:30 so I figured I'd take my SRT-8 into work and then after the appointment swing by my house so put that away and pick up the truck before it started snowing. Well, I went to leave at 12:10 and found that it was snowing pretty good. Hum... seems like he was wrong this time. The shop is kind of in the middle of nowhere so I had about 10 miles of untreated back country roads to drive on before I got to any of the main roads. I turned off the ESP and hung the back of the car out while leaving the driveway. Yeah, that was fun!
Cruised sideways for about 1/8 of a mile up the road. There was nobody around so that was fun too! It was time to do some normal driving. At that point I found that it couldn't be done.
The turned the ESP back on and found that the road was extremely slippery. Power was reduced to almost nothing to
try to keep the tires from spinning. So besides working the throttle, I also keep turning the ESP on and off to get some power to move the car. Either way, any throttle input would break the tires lose and bring the back of the car out. It did this over and over and over. Actually took me about 3/4 of a mile to get enough momentum to reach 25-30 MPH. The ESP did a good job of keep the car straight when needed but the roads were just to slippery to be driving this car. Everytime the back drifted out towards a pole I kept thinking "limited production car, it might take awhile to replace". I did what I had to, made it home later and life was much better after I got behind the wheel of my 4WD Sierra.
For you guys and girls that use these year round, be VERY careful out there! We want to keep you and the cars around for awhile.