QOTD: Are You Getting Away With Not Having Grip?

As I type this, the first flakes of this winter’s first real dumping of snow are falling lazily outside my window. By morning, the landscape should resemble the countertop in a Studio 54 bathroom. Then the real fun begins.

Carefully gauging your braking distance and leaving more room between your car and the car ahead, wondering all the while if that Rogue you can’t see around is hugging the back bumper of the car in front. Wondering what’s going to break loose first on a highway off-ramp — the front end or the rear. Trying to coax frozen wiper blades off the windshield without leaving the rubber strip behind. Downshifting at the top of hills. Trying to clear freezing rain off your windows without turning into William H. Macy in Fargo.

Never mind what happens in the ritzy ski lodges of Sweden and the Alps. Winter sucks. The only perk is it’s a lot easier to make a U-turn, assuming there’s no cops around and your vehicle’s e-brake isn’t of the electronic kind.

Depending on where you call home, you’ve probably switched your seasonal rubber by now. Or have you?

Maybe you should have made the switch, but didn’t. It might be a mild winter, you thought. After all, last year’s wasn’t so bad. You figure you can get away with it. Perhaps you’re living right on the meteorological border of “Why would anyone bother?” and “They’ll find me when spring rolls around.”

A few winters back, I ended up spending the “cold” season driving around with snow tires filling my trunk and backseat after the blizzards one would expect of the Great White North failed to materialize. With nature not fulfilling its end of the deal, they eventually headed back to the corner of the garage.

Maybe there’s no laws on the books in your frigid jurisdiction — and no money-saving clauses in your insurance policy — to make the switch worthwhile. This assumes, of course, complete confidence in your driving abilities and a fingers-crossed outlook on any incidents requiring rapid reaction that might crop up on the highway. This was my go-to plan for years: an old front-drive car, and a set of the cheapest all-seasons rotated front to back every year.

School’s not cheap, and adding two new tires each November worked year after year.

The clouds parted and the sun shone through when I finally bought my first set of Blizzaks. A revelation. I finally realized what I had been missing all those years. It was all the more timely, as that particular car, an ’03 Grand Am, “benefitted” from General Motors’ supremely horrible anti-lock brakes, seemingly carried over unchanged from a ’93 Corsica I owned years earlier. When the car detected a slippery surface, it “saved” its occupants by simply not trying to stop. Snow tires, and sometimes the added drag of a parking brake-induced sideways drift, came in real handy.

Why, GM, why?

But back to the question at hand. Do any of these scenarios ring a bell? Are you playing with fire this winter (and perhaps every winter) by not swapping your summer rubber? Why? And how much of the white stuff should a driver expect to tolerate before adding a set of snows to his or her life?