Mini All 4 – Can It Handle The Snow?
We needed to get out of the house, but we weren’t sure if our mini would make it.
First, things first, we have to de-snow and de-ice it.
We are going to attempt to leave the house.
We are going to attempt to leave the house.
We’ve still got, as you can see, quite a bit of the white stuff and the drive, it doesn’t get gritted.
It’s had nothing go over it since it snowed, which was two days ago.
It froze overnight. We woke up this morning to ice on the insides of the
Windows, and we’ve still got all of this.
The Mini is four-wheel drive.
Never driven it in snow before.
Got no idea how it will cope with this, or if it will, so this will be an interesting experiment.
But first things first I’ve got to get all the snow off the car.
Including the roof. Now I know that there are lots of people out there who drive around with snow on their roofs and it’s really kind of, it can be infuriating, if you’re behind somebody that’s done that on a motorway and it comes sliding off it can quite happily take your windscreen out.
So, please clear the roof off your car.
This is gonna take longer than I thought.
It isn’t ideal ‘cos you’ve actually be careful not to catch the roof of the car.
‘cos the last thing we want is lots of scratches all over the place.
Ohh, I’ve got snow in me glove.
Ian: Stop flicking me.
Jo: That’s it, you flick it at me.
Ian: I’m not doing it deliberately.
Jo: No, I know.
Jo: Tell you what, if we had a snowball fight now, it would hurt.
Ian: Yes.
That’s most of the snow gone.
I’m gonna start her up, turn on all the heated windscreen type stuff and hopefully, we’ll get her going.
Having got rid of the lump behind the car we should be able to just reverse back without too much of a difficulty.
Famous last words.
So armed with spade I’m gonna make some tracks in the snow to hopefully allow the car to travel up the driveway.
Probably won’t work, but, you know. Something to do, in’t it?
Just to clarify
We would have filmed our excursions out in the snow, but we thought, you know, probably best to pay more attention to the snow and not talking to a camera, which we thought might be a bit dangerous- hence the monologue.
We thought because of the fact that we have this lovely white stuff to play with we would have a crack at taking the mini out in it and seeing how it would cope.
It’s a MINI Countryman all4 version and we thought, you know, it’s four-wheel drive.
It’ll cope with the snow, won’t it?
And to some degree, the answer to that is yes.
The thing that you notice about it is that the clearance is a bit eeeeee.
You can hear the sort of, the snow scraping underneath in places.
Which is slightly terrifying.
But other than that it was great.
Obviously, this sort of car has got tires that are designed generally to drive on the road.
So there were a few places where it just couldn’t cope with the depth of the snow and the slipperiness.
But once we dug it out a bit, it handled beautifully.
There’s a lot of traction control and clever stuff going on in there.
Once we around the roads, no skidding, no slowing around, nothing.
It just gripped, which was quite surprising considering the state that the roads are in.
We didn’t encounter any black ice, which is a great thing because black ice is an absolute nightmare.
So we haven’t had the experience of seeing what it’ll do on that unless of course we did experience it and we didn’t notice.
Unlikely I think.
So generally it does brilliantly in the snow.
If we get more of this snow, which they’re telling me is possibly likely, then at some point, we’re going to invest in some snow chains because it means an awful lot less shovelling to clear the driveway out.
So a general thumbs up for MINI
Countryman all4.
I’m going away now. ‘cos, you know.
Jo: Err, ooh, you what, is what, it’s working.
Ha ha her her.
Ian: That was the only route that I could get it to move.
Jo: How long have you been dragging yourself for?
Ian: Ha, I was nearly at the top.
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