BinaryJay

We got a good amount of quick snow/ice on the way home this afternoon, and I skidded a bit into a left turn going towards my parking garage. The VSC light didn't light up and nothing beeped. It was a lateral skid with the rear coming out from behind me.

It's a AWD GS... I could have swore on a few occasions before that I got that skid light to come up and it would beep at me angrily. With the car clearly skidding, what gives, is something wrong with VSC? I don't get any warnings about VSC/Trac.

Maybe I misunderstand the trac/vsc system, and it can't do jack in this kind of situation where the wheels lose traction and go laterally? I don't have snow tires, and I didn't expect that going awd and having the trac system would be a substitute for driving carefully in slippery conditions but I was just surprised that nothing seemed to kick in and at least attempt to keep the car tracking straight. I probably wasn't accelerating at the time, just coasting into the turn.

Or I guess another thing is that maybe the the trac/vsc only kicks in when going above a certain speed, and is disabled during low speed maneuvering? I don't remember reading anything in depth about how it actually works in the manual but I could be wrong and should probably go get it.

gridlock13

iTrader: (1)

i'm pretty sure VSC and traction control systems on all cars only work when at least some throttle is applied. if you were coasting in like you said you were that's probably why nothing happened. i don't know the exact reason why but i think it's along the lines of having some sort of power going to the wheels so that the computer system knows how to split the power.

BinaryJay

I thought part of the equation is applying braking force to individual wheels as well, which doesn't involve any drive power obviously. In any case, it snowed a lot over the past weekend and I noticed many cases where the skid light would flicker and at least one occurrence where the light was accompanied by the car squaking at me with that annoying beep sound so I guess all is well and I just don't "get" what situations cause it to kick in.

Next year I'm putting snow tires on this thing. Maybe I'm just dreaming but it seems that in some situations I have more trouble with the AWD GS than I did with my 6 speed matrix in the snow - doesn't really make sense to me since the GS weighs a lot more, has traction control which the matrix lacked completely and is AWD. I haven't owned an automatic car in quite a while though, so maybe the fact that I'm lacking the fine tuned throttle control of a clutch is the reason or the fact that I'm really not driving it as carefully as I did before because subconsciously I think I'm infallible with all of the trac goodies and awd in this car.

The G Man

Stability system only kicks in at above some low speed, not sure what that speed is.

StealthAWD

Snow tires are the key . I have Blizzacks on mine in the winter (I also have a GS300 AWD) and it is awesome in the snow!

Oh, and there is also the "Winter" setting button that you should have, that will start the car off in a different gear for automatics (which may help your transition from manual to automatic driving in the snow).

Hope this helps!

BinaryJay

Yeah, I tried the Snow ECT setting. I'm not convinced it starts off in second gear, it seems it mainly changes the throttle response curve to really retard the majority of the throw in the gas pedal to make it easier to ease your way off from a stop. It also seems to keep the car in higher gears longer when letting off the pedal reducing the overall amount of gear shifting. Overall, it makes the car quite the mushy machine but I appreciated that it's there and I've already instructed my wife to use it when there's snow on the road but I'll probably forego it myself most of the time.

Does anybody know why the skid light sometimes flashes, but it's not always accompanied by the beep? I assume that the beep is probably programmed to only occur when the car thinks it's not completely controlling the loss in traction, otherwise it just blinks to let you know it's doing something where you might otherwise not realize it.

RudeDoggy

I believe the flashing is traction control being activated and the flashing with the beep is vehicle skid control being activated.

I drove New Years Eve on country roads northeast of the GTA with my snow tires (Hankook Icebears --nothing special) and it was solid. Winter tires are a must on these cars (and on any car for that matter).