I had a narrow escape in the snow earlier this year.
I had popped in to town in clear weather, but by the time I started driving back snow had started falling. Everyone must have decided to get home as quickly as possible as the main, gritted, roads were suddenly at almost total gridlock. I had the, not so bright as it turned out, idea of taking the un-gritted back roads.

I was making good progress until the last stretch of road, down a hill towards my house. This last bit of my journey included a 19% downhill gradient and, on this particular day, a sign warning of ice. Looking back, I should have turned round and found a different route, but hindsight would be much more useful at the time.

As I started down the hill I put the car into first gear, using the engine to keep my speed down. I tried testing the brakes before I got too far into my descent and found that they were now useless. The ABS didn't have a snowball's chance in Hell. If anything I gained speed as the wheels locked.

By the time I had navigated the steepest part of the drop my speed had climbed from 3mph to about 20mph. All the while I was trying to work out how to negotiate the buttock-clenchingly tight corner at the bottom of the hill. Without breaks my only option was to try and accelerate slightly to find as much grip as possible on the Teflon-like road surface. I managed to wrestle the car round the bend with my wheel using the curb in the same way a pinball uses the bumpers.

Surprised at having survived the worst part of the hill I was relieved to find that my brakes had returned, at least in part. I started scrubbing off speed in preparation for the traffic lights at the end of the road, but my adventure was not over yet. As I approached the lights there was a car sat there and as I realised that I was not going to stop in time a white van came up the road the opposite way. In a split second decision I squeezed between the stationary car and the oncoming van, almost ruining a perfectly good pair of trousers in the process.

The punchline to this story is that after surviving all of that my car was hit by a lorry in clear weather as I was slowing down to wait for a gap in the traffic less than three days later. The entire right hand side of the car needed to be replaced - doors, panels, the lot.

Apologies for length and all that. I haven't done this very many times before.
(Mr._Pickles, Thu 22 Apr 2010, 13:30, Reply)