| AzNMpower32 |
02-14-2007 08:40 PM |
I too took the X3 out this morning and brought it as a demo for my car enthusiast-teacher to try out. It was amazing with the snow tires, and indeed conditions were very poor because of the 4" of sleet+ice caked together. The X3 went pretty much where it was pointed, even if it was through an unplowed part of the road. Brakes were super reassuring, espeially in one incident I'm going to describe.
However, I really must give a big :thumbdown to the road crews. First of all, this ice was no fun to drive in simply because the ruts in the ice dictated where the car went sometimes, not the steering. Indeed there was one instance where we tried to make a turn in the neighborhood, and conditions were so bad, the X3 was scrabbling and wheelspinning (up to 4000rpm) and half moving for a bit before it finaly hooked up fully.
In addition, the road crews seemed to ignore the lanes on all the roads, so the "clear" path would change in matter of seconds. For example, I was getting onto a two-lane local lane on I-270, and started to shift left since it appeared to be clear. And then all of a sudden, the pavement disappears and I see a bunker of unplowed snow (basically, you'd lose a lane out of nowhere). Now, I understand losing a lane, but basically what they did, was plow a lane clear for 1000 feet, neglect the next 1000 feet, and then continue plowing the lane. To make matters worse, the car a few car lengths ahead of me hit the brakes. I hit the brakes hard, full tilt ABS (thanks to the frozen slush), and stayed on the brakes as hard as I could to prevent a rear-end. Luckily, I had left enough distance and the tires were able to grip and slow the X down considerably from 65-40mph in a matter of 5 or 6 seconds. BAD ROAD CREWS THIS YEAR (in the DC area):gun: (but great X3 active safety!)
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