Duncan Parks
Member
I think you said your experience was with good snow tires (good on you for using them). With respect, you may not be experiencing the limits of traction very much. You're right, of course, that feathering the accelerator can prevent the rear-wheel slip...but you have to feather because the regen brake force distribution is wrong. Or, put another way, if the regen brake force was better distributed (as in is with off-road assist) you could get more regenerative braking force and control before the tires slip. To me, that's just better performance, period.I have a Y, so can't turn it off. The regen in my case was partially disabled, maybe 3 dots, so not really apples to apples, if I'm honest (cold outside, SOC about 60%).
But really, in normal snow driving, you learn in about 100 ft how to feather the regen with your foot, so you can add as much as you want any time, from 0- full regen.
Really, if you're complaining that when you lift off suddenly on an icy downhill corner at 35, and the car gets squirrely, you're driving wrong. That's like saying your manual awd car got too loose when you downshifted from 3rd to 1st at 35 in the same corner. We would all point and laugh.
Don't lift suddenly in icy conditions. Feather it as needed.
Our previous cars since 2005 have been an 05 Outback, 12 Outback, 14 Outback, and an 04 Forester we had the whole time too, still have it. All with Blizzack snow tires, snow on the ground from Nov to April (on and off).
Besides the Y, Subarus are hands down the best snow cars, IMO. Friend of mine also previously a Subaru fanatic, has had his Y for 3 years in Spokane (maybe the first one here). He says the same thing.
So yes, it is definitely a good idea to drive smoothly in the snow, and that will certainly minimize slips...but Tesla could make their cars perform much better in the snow (and tolerate stronger regen braking) if they had a traction mode that got the regen brake force distribution more even between front and rear. And, bonus, folks who pull their foot off the accelerator in a dicey situation (which is an ingrained and pretty sensible intuition) would not be fishtailing around.
Incidentally, I think I heard somewhere that the gearing between the motor and wheels is different front/rear, and that Tesla is trying to use the most efficient effective gear ratio by changing the blend between front and rear torque for both acceleration and braking. That's fine when traction is not an issue, but we NEED a mode that limits that rear-wheel bias for regen braking but doesn't defeat traction control (as off-road assist does).