First opportunity for snow today. I can finally answer a question that has been on my mind since I placed the order for the G. How would it do in the snow? More importantly can it navigate down my 13% grade winding driveway in slippery conditions? Why shouldn’t perform great? Well, it lacks a hill descent mode which in experience crushes the normal ESP mode in terms of keeping the vehicle under control. Mrs. D went down the hill in her X3 using HDC. She said the ABS brakes sounded like two angry badgers fight under her car all the way down the hill. My turn was next. Without going into low range or manually shifting, I figured I just see how the default drive mode would perform. When I got half way down to the hill and realized that the ABS hadn’t kicked in once. So the ultimate test, hit the brakes and come to a stop. No issues whatsoever. The Grabbers are named appropriately.
Time to play. I headed over to a park to tryout the different drive modes. First, I found I needed to hit the brakes pretty hard to get the ABS to kick me in. Second, the rear tires tended to break free first under hard acceleration. Breaking the back end loose was easy enough when coming out of a turn (note: doing this on purpose). Putting it into low range and locking the center differential (1) didn’t really change this response. Locking the rear differential (2) didn’t change the liveliness in the back end either. Only after locking the front differential (3), did the feel of rear bias in traction finally disappear. With all differentials locked, my attempts to drift in the snow resulted in huge amounts of understeer as expected. As side note, differential 1 locked immediately, the other two took as long as 30 seconds or so to lock. Two features I liked was shifting from high to low while moving (25 mph limit and shifting to neutral first) and the ability to shift directly from forward to reverse while in low. The latter allows for effective rocking while getting unstuck.
A bit of snow in the tread - General Grabber A/TX Doesn’t look very much like Emerald Green
Slideshow: A one-of-one U.S.-spec Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren Roadster became even rarer after a factory-backed transformation at McLaren's headquarters.
