Blessed by the Potato

It’s crazy in Toronto this weekend, and this is also my first chance to test out my Nokian WRs in the nasty stuff (snow, then rain + ice).

I had heard that one downside to the tires was road noise, but even listening for it I could only say that it was noisier when taking turns or braking at slow speeds. Going in a straight line really doesn’t have any noticeable extra noise.

I’ve never had a set of dedicated snow tires before, so I can only compare these to all-seasons (most recently, Michelin RainForce MX’s). There is a quite noticeable improvement in snow and ice traction. On a road and a driveway that had turned to glare ice so slippery I slid down it after getting out of the car, there wasn’t much of a problem with the car stopping on it. The ABS did kick in, and the stopping distance was longer than it would have been on a dry road, but not nearly by the same amount as I would have slid in the all-seasons.

Snow grip seemed good, but one strange thing I noticed was that the car seems to decelerate more strongly in deep snow/slush than I was used to. There was no wheel spin when trying to get up to a start (using of course, gentle acceleration) from within deep snow. The car was pushed around a bit by wheel ruts, and when making a turn through that pile of snow left behind by the plow in an intersection. I was a little surprised at how much the car seemed to be forced into existing wheel ruts, but the snow was particularly deep (about 3″ on the road), very wet, and thus, very heavy.

After experiencing this, I don’t think I could go back to regular all-seasons. I think these tires are an excellent compromise between the grip of a proper set of winter tires, and the convenience of a single set.

Well, it looks like the over a thousand Canadians who took advantage of the strong dollar in the last few months and bought cars in the US, only to be turned away by an overly specific rule on immobilizers will get amnesty and be allowed to register their vehicles. This will hopefully keep pressure on the auto makers to keep lowering their prices in Canada. I doubt we’ll see pricing on par, even if the currencies are, but the prices should drop to within 6-10% so that it’s no longer worth the effort… and if they don’t, then I’ll probably be planning a trip down south when it’s finally time to let my car go…

Tracking my gas mileage, there’s a noticeable drop in efficiency when winter comes around. There are a number of things that cause this, and I can’t really do much about a lot of them. Winter gas blends, snow, and decreased temperatures all take their toll. As does my change in habits as the weather cools down: no longer up for long walks down Richmond when I want to eat out, and with the start of curling season, I start taking the car more often for short trips within the city, and short trips can have quite a dismal effect on fuel economy. Winter can make that even worse with more idling required to get the car warmed up and clear…

1. Idling: this is a good way to waste fuel, burning it up by not moving. Generally, I try to avoid idling when I can, by doing things like buckling my seatbelt before I start the engine so I can just put the car in gear and drive off, and by shutting the car off when trains are going by and I know I’m not going to be moving. In the winter however, that changes for me as I need to have the car idle for a bit at startup if there’s any fog on the windows. A lot of places say the best way to warm up the car is by driving it, and for what it’s worth, that’s true… but for me, it’s not about the car being warm, it’s about being able to safely see. I won’t be the person recklessly driving around leaned over the wheel squinting through the sliver of clear window at the bottom, so I wait until it clears up, even if it costs me some more in gas/efficiency. Unfortunately, this is one compromise I have to make for winter driving without much recourse. Someone did suggest trying an anti-fog glass cleaner to reduce condensation in the first place, and I’ll have to give that a go.
2. Radiator block: similar to the theme of idling, in the winter the car’s engine can often run more than it needs to in order to get up and stay at operating temperature. A block heater can help a bit with this, but isn’t quite so useful for my situation because I don’t really have a set schedule (whereas a daily commuter might be able to better predict their car use and make use of an outdoor timer to run the heater), and because I park in a parking lot out behind the house (and… er… my car doesn’t have a block heater installed). Coincidentally, a block heater can also help ease the starting process. However, another component of winter engine operating temperature is staying at operating temperature. In that case, the openings at the front of the car to let air flow over the radiator are actually too large; the radiator has to have the cooling capacity to keep the engine cool when running full out in the summer heat. So too much cooling takes place in the winter, and some people recommend blocking the radiator openings in the winter, often with pipe insulation. Now, common sense would dictate that one should tie the pipe insulation down in some way, but I figured I’d give it a whirl and see how it worked without that, and lost one segment that was just compression-fit on my first highway drive, so I’m going to have to figure out how to secure it now.
3. Tires: One way to improve mileage and extend tire life is to inflate your tires beyond the door jamb value (but still staying safely under the tire’s sidewall pressure). However, while I know that modern tires don’t really lose much traction under higher pressures, I’m hesitant to run too high in the winter. In the summer, I’ve been running 3 PSI over the door jamb (up to 35 PSI in my case) and have been experimenting with 40 PSI (which is the compromise value of my door jamb and maximum sidewall pressures). Of course, under-inflated tires are a safety and efficiency issue as well. Since air contracts at colder temperatures, I’m starting out this year at 37 PSI, and expecting that it will drop to the door jamb value of 32 PSI by the time it gets really cold out. As always, regular monitoring is important! Tire selection can also impact fuel economy, but a set of winter tires (or a good set of all-seasons and a careful driver) is critical in winter, so this is another area where we just have to sort of suck it up and accept that there’s going to be a mileage hit in winter.
4. Snow: I get much tireder walking through deep or shifting snow than I do when walking along a cleared road, and I’m pretty sure the same thing happens for a car that has to force its way through the snow (on top of the fact that if the roads are crappy, you’ve got to drive slower to stay safe). Since I have a more flexible schedule in terms of my car use, I can avoid the worst of the road conditions: call up the ‘rents or my friends and say I’m not driving to Toronto in that, give a night of curling a pass (which happens fairly often when there’s late afternoon snow, as London seems to like to wait until the next morning to plow it if it starts after 4 pm or so). As a grad student, I even have the freedom a lot of the time to stay an extra night in Toronto if I get stuck there when the white stuff comes and just work later when I do get back. While avoiding the nasty times can help improve fuel economy, the reason I do it is for safety, and I recommend anyone who has to drive in the winter sort of step back and ask yourself if you really need to be out driving when it’s nasty out.
5. Short trips: Short trips are bad for mileage at any time, but especially in the winter when each trip requires the car warm itself up and defog the windows, etc. So one killer for me is of course the bizarre seasonal predisposition towards short trips to the curling club, shopping mall, etc. Really the only way to avoid some of this is to try to combine trips as much as possible. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much success with that last year: trying to go X-mas shopping before curling put too much pressure on an already stressful time, because I had to be out of there at a very specific time, and of course nearly everything is closed afterwards. Going grocery shopping works a fair bit better right after curling, but that was about the only trip combination I was able to work out. Hopefully this will be a more helpful tip for my constant readers.
6. Slowing the hell down: a good year-round tip, slowing the hell down is doubly effective in the winter because it’s also the basic premise of safer winter driving.

Well, with the Canadian dollar being high there is a lot of talk in the media about buying a car in the states and importing it. There are a lot of cases where that can save you a lot of money, sometimes as much as a quarter of the cost of the car. There are all kinds of artificial trade barriers put up (so much for NAFTA) to try to prevent people from doing this. Some manufacturer’s won’t honour the warranty if a car is bought across the border. Toyota for one does honour the warranty, but makes it difficult by threatening to close down any dealers that sell to Canadians, so finding one is difficult (often, I’ve heard that finding one in a border state is nearly impossible, but if you’re willing to drive a few states further south, that there is a chance of finding a dealer who will take the chance, or not even know about the prohibition). The government also puts up a few barriers, such as making sure that the car is suitable for use in Canada, with daytime running lights, an metric instrumentation (or a sticker indicating to the driver and potential future buyers that the instruments are not metric).

Now another barrier has been put up with a recent rule about engine immobilizers. When I first heard about this, I actually thought it was a decent rule, since my car had been stolen twice. However, after seeing what thieves will do to get at cars with immobilizers I have second thoughts. Doubly so after seeing that the RIV is using the “lack” of immobilizers as a reason to prevent cars bought in the States from crossing the border. Note that these cars don’t actually lack immobilizers — the Prius system, for instance, is supposed to be nigh-impossible to start without the key or a sophisticated RF-cryptographic system. It’s just that it doesn’t have exactly the right type of immobilizer, so it can’t enter the country.

And it boggles my mind why the government would force auto makers to produce unique models for the Canadian market for things like engine immobilizers, but be unwilling to do so for emissions control (and even then it wouldn’t be different than California and the other CARB states, just the dirty states!).

Update: Another story about this in the Globe: drivers can bring their cars across the border to park them at home until this is worked out, but they can’t get them plated.

Tires are one of a number of very important pieces of equipment on a car, and are easily overlooked. Keeping tire pressures up can help improve fuel economy (and as long as you never exceed the sidewall pressure, they can be pumped up above what the door jamb recommends with the only side effect being a harsher ride). My old tires were starting to get a little run down after nearly 100,000 km. The legal minimum treadwear is where the wear marks are at 2/32″ tread depth, and I was at a little less than double the wear marks (3-4/32″). But, several articles don’t recommend using all-season tires in the winter with less than 4/32″ of tread, and I’m inclined to agree. I was leaning towards getting a second set of dedicated snow tires, an inconvenient practice that my dad used to do but has grown to loathe, but which everyone else recommends once they do it (snow tires really do have much better traction in the nasty stuff; as an aside, 4×4/AWD drivers should really think about snow tires since it’s “4 wheel go, not 4 wheel stop” — the tires determine the stopping part). Since London can be a little tardy when it comes to cleaning up after a snow dump, I’ve found it particularly important to drive conservatively in the winter and keep my tires in good shape.

So, I lamented for a while the decision to replace my tires, wondering instead if I should replace the car. While it does have some negative emotional associations after being stolen (twice!), and has started making a few distressing sounds, the sounds haven’t actually gotten any worse recently. It’s a good car that should have another few tens of thousands of kilometers left in it, and it just makes good economic sense to keep it running (as long as nothing else major breaks down, and no matter how cool the technology underneath a Prius is).

I replaced the tires today with Nokain WRs. The timing was decided in part by a sale at the local Kal Tire (taking about $70 off the price of four). I haven’t heard too much about these tires in most of the review sites I visited, though there was a good review of them on the Canadian Driver site. However, there has been a lot of good word-of-mouth about them around the internet, and Kal Tire also highly recommended them, so I decided to give them a try. They are a relatively new and revolutionary tire design, an all-season tire that is a “true 4 season” rather than a “3 season” tire like many others. It carries the “mountain and snowflake” severe service marking that’s only given to snow tires (the M+S marking, on the other hand, is pretty meaningless). So a lot of people are excited about having a tire that comes close to the snow/ice traction of a dedicated snow tire, without the need to switch out for the summer.

Only having driven about a kilometer I can’t really comment on their performance so far. One compromise they make is a noisier ride, but I haven’t gotten up to speeds where I could possibly say yet. I hope to do a more critical review of them after logging a few thousand kilometers of winter driving on them.

I had never been to Kal Tire before, but they seem like a decent outfit, with many locations across Canada. They were friendly, but there were some issues in getting my tires. I had first made an appointment last week, but they ended up selling the set of tires they set aside for me before I got there. Fortunately, they did call me before I left to let me know, which I think is a decent way of handling the situation. The service was fairly slow today (two guys were in the office helping customers, one constantly on the phone and one very slowly ringing up the bill of the last customer). Like many other tire outfits, they offer free rotations every 10,000 km along with a road hazard guarantee. Their prices for most services (installation, balancing, the tires themselves) seemed competitive with other locations in the city. They couldn’t quite match the Costco sale on Michelins, but then again Costco had a very limited selection for that sale. The one exception was that they quoted me $80 to do an alignment, and while I haven’t gone to get a competitive quote, that seemed a little high to me (I seem to recall my last one cost $50, and I wasn’t buying 4 tires from them at the time!).