What to Expect: My First 996 C2 Winter

Hey folks, I'd love to get some feedback on what to expect with my 996 this winter. No PSM. Buying a set of 17's with Yokohama Iceguards on them. I'm not an idiot when it comes to winter driving. I know how to take it nice and easy. I guess, I'd just like to hear the experience of others so that I have an idea of what my baby is going to be like on a wintry day (should I need to venture/get caught out). Thanks!

Mine was a C4, but the conventional wisdom is that the awd doesn't make a big difference in winter driving - it's more of a dry road high performance thing. I drove mine in light snow conditions with all-season tires and it did great. I now have a different car but doubt that I will take the 996tt out in the snow simply because I don't want to buy another set of wheels and tires this year.

I had a C4 also, with Conti DWS (really just all-season tires), and it did fine the few times I ventured out on snow covered roads. With true snow tires I think you will do about as well as a typical FWD sedan with snows, although without PSM you will need to watch how far you let the rear end get out of line.

No 996 experience in the snow other than with my 996 Turbo and on summer tires. I've had my Boxster in the snow a few times with summer tires, too. You are wise to put real snow tires on your car. I was dumb and lucky I got away with what I did. For the Boxster I added some sand bags in the front and rear trunk. The car's pretty light. Also, I wanted some sand just in case I got stuck. I added a good quality nylon tow strap with u-bolts to connect the strap to the tow bolt eye in either the front or rear of the car in case I ended up in a snow bank and had to be towed out. Never had to use this. Under some conditions the side windows can freeze up and refuse to drop when you open the door. This is bad enough but if you are not paying attention when you go to close the door there can be a heck of a bang as the glass hits the top, at least this was the case with my Boxster. If you spot the window failing to drop do not close the door but from inside the car push the window down button and at the same time gently push down on the window. It shouldn't take hardly any force to get it to move. If you need to you can wiggle the glass a bit to break the grip of the ice at where the window enters the door. Once the window goes down -- and up again -- under manual control close the door then raise the window manually. Be sure the wipers are good. Be sure to fill the washer tank with good quality washer fluid that won't freeze. Gas stations where I lived -- just east of KC MO -- would store 1 gallon jugs of washer fluid outside in the cold weather. After a day or two of particularly cold weather I'd grab a couple of jugs and pick those with no ice in them. Be sure the radiator ducts are clean and free of trash and dirt. Ditto the body water drains. Remember when you park the car heat will cause any slush under the wheel wells to melt and this melt water -- a mix of water, salt and grit -- will drip down on the wheels/brakes. When you get back in the car be sure to use the brakes some without bringing the car to a stop to dry and clean the rust off the rotors. If you fail to do this and have to use the brakes for an emergency stop pad material can transfer from the pads to the rotors and remain on the rotors and cause pulsing brakes afterwards. Whenever the temperature gets above freezing visit a DIY car wash and with the rinse setting rinse the car down and remove any build up of ice/slush from anywhere on or under the car. In one case after a long -- hours long -- drive through a bad snowstorm in my Boxster when I finally managed to get through the worst of it and far enough out of the storm to pull off the road without fear of getting stuck -- summer tires don't you know -- I found a car wash and spent I don't know how much money in quarters running the carwash and removing the build up snow/slush. The stuff was built up -- make that built down -- to the point there was barely any clearance between the tires and the ice/slush, the radiator ducts were nearly full, and the area where the front windshield and cowl joined was so built up hardly any air was getting into the cabin. I had driven through a horrific snow storm with some areas in which I drove through receiving nearly 12" of snow. This and the fact my car was a constant target of snow/slush thrown up by the big rig in front of me -- the driver told me his rig was empty and he was having to really take it easy too -- had my Boxster looking like a dirty snowball. The heater I found is just fine provided snow/slush doesn't collect to the point air flow into the cabin is blocked. Had I snow tires on the car I would have pulled off long before this happened and removed the stuff but had I pulled off I would have been in unplowed snow and I would have been stuck/stranded. In the case of my Boxster the top sheds snow and dries pretty quick and the same goes for the rear plastic window. What else? Watch out for chunks of frozen slush in the road. Also watch out for road kill. Any dead animal will turn into a froze solid lump. Catch one of these wrong and you can bust a radiator or worse. And watch out for when driving down the road the wind lifting a sheet of ice/frozen snow off the vehicle ahead. You don't want to let one of these flying icebergs hit your car if you can safely avoid it. Last but not least my experience is most people drive like idiots in bad weather. (And good weather and every kind of weather in between...). You got to ever more so watch out of the other guy. In bad weather I slow way down and try to give myself plenty of room to deal with the idiots who will spin out in front of one, or brake and slide into one's lane, or slide through an intersection right into one's path. You name it, it will happen. In this same vein watch where you park the car. Youtube is full of videos of cars sliding down a hill into parked cars or even climbing the curb and sliding over the frozen ground and slamming into a car parked in a driveway. Watch out too after the storm after the roads get clear. Spots of the road will get snow melt water and then at night freeze up and be very slick. This catches more drivers by surprise than you might think. And watch out for shaded roads. Some years ago on a trip coming back home back west I ran into a snow/ice storm and pulled off the road at Shamrock TX. Spent the night in a hotel. The next day the freeway will still icy -- TX road crews believe God put the snow/ice on the freeway and only God can take it off -- so I avoided the freeway and went through town heading south. Just a few miles down the road I was out of the nastiness. (Oh at the time I was in my 2006 GTO with, you guessed it, summer tires.) Found a road heading west towards Amarillo but even though the sky was clear and the sun out where leafless trees shaded the roadway there was still some frost on the road surface.

Tires make all the difference. The 996 AWD system doesn't offer much in winter conditions. You'll enjoy driving your Porsche in snow and slush.

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That's what I am kind of hoping. I think back to the Jalopnik video of the Subaru Forester with All-Seasons versus a BMW M3 with Snows on a icy Chicago hill. The M3 made mince-meat out of the Subaru. Really hit on how important tires are in the bad stuff.

IMHO. If you have to drive out in the snow or ice, take another car. Leave your Porsche in the garage. There are 101 reasons 'why not' as Mactser pointed out. If you don't really value your Porsche then go ahead and run the gauntlet of 'what could happen scenarios'.. You may not be an idiot but there are thousands of so called good drivers out there that are. The 2 photos of a Porsche car doing figure eights and drifting on an EMPTY car park says nothing at all of how the car or you will handle a bad situation on the roads.

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I appreciate the honesty. We have an S3 - or should I say, my wife has one - that I'll usually take on the days I need to venture out. The snows are really precautionary for when I absolutely, positively have to go out, and so does the wife. They're also for the proceeding days/nights after a storm.

Like I said in another threat, I drive my car the whole winter, and I don't change the tires. !!!!!!! Sent from my iPhone using Rennlist

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The weight of the engine over the drive wheels helps with traction too. There are some good videos on the Tire Rack website that show the differences. Proper winter tires simply perform better that all-seasons in winter conditions. Summer tires are dangerous in winter conditions.

I live in S. Carolina, but got caught this past February in Pennsylvania with my summer Sumitomos, worn about halfway down. Not fun! Had to go about 50 more miles when it started accumulating quickly. I grew up in the stuff, so at first I wasn't worried, but my rear tires had almost no traction, and had a penchant for breaking loose VERY easily. Found myself sideways 4 times, and how I didn't end up in a ditch still amazes me. I'm sure I'd have been fine with proper tires. Won't make that mistake again!

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Just watched the TR videos. Though it is not representative of real world conditions in my neck of the woods, the ice rink challenge was great. Definitely going to spring for the 17" wheels with dedicated snows. Justification for the wife are the TR videos.

I've seen the difference in action. I live in the mountains, so things tend to get pretty nasty up here in the winter. When we still had our Cayenne S, I ran an all-season tire (Continental ExtremeContact DWS) as the summer tire and a dedicated winter tire (Michelin Latitude Alpin) in the winter. Once year we had a big snow storm in September and I still had the all-seasons on the Cayenne. My wife couldn't get the car up the driveway with the all-season tires; the Cayenne was down at the bottom of the hill with all four wheels spinning. Once I switched to proper winter tires, the Cayenne could drive up the driveway like it was dry.

I have used Mich Alpins and now Mich all season tires on the stock 17 inch wheels. I enjoy winter driving on dry and wet/snowy roads, since these types of tires provide less grip in all conditions than summer tires do. And that allows you to experience the feeling of driving a more vintage Porsche model which moves around a lot on their skinnier tires and stiffer suspensions. I think an autocross series where everyone has to use Pep Boys full depth snow tires on stock-width wheels would be really fun. Kind of a spec racing series as tires (even bad ones) are great equalizers.

That's a great idea. I suppose that we try to replicate that every January. Our local Porsche club hosts and event called Eiskhana every year. It's essentially an autocross on a frozen lake.

Nothing more fun than driving sideways. Add a short sleeve polo shirt and a starched linen helmet and you are Fangio!

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I'm just going to +1 this right here.

My first 996C2 was a guy's year round DD in Chicago for over a decade.

Just where are you kstarr? What people call 'winter' varies a lot. If you expect any 6" snows or more, you won't be going anywhere in a 996 those days. Ex., Chicago in my mind really doesn't have winter.

As others have suggested, the fun doesn't truly start until you need to look out the side window to see where you're going. As Stever points out, traction is only have the battle. If snow actually accumulates between plowings where you live, you will wind up high-centered or at the very least messing up the front bumper. As a California transplant, I will _only_ drive an SUV in the snow. CA people can't cope with snow - most have no idea how to drive, and many will, after their first slide, stop wherever they are and put on chains. Every winter we wind up having to drive around the asshats who has stop in the middle of the road to chain up. On the plus side, these are generally the SAME people who ignore speed ratings and wind up flailing their cars with busted chains.

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OP, a review thread after you get those iceGuards would be much appreciated. I've been contemplating the same setup as well but reluctant to pull the trigger since there doesn't seem to be any first hand experience on this forum. Since I'm in Seattle metro, I've got a few more weeks I can squeeze out of my summer tires before I really have to make a switch...

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That's actually a good point. When I lived in northern Indiana, the winter conditions were quite different than they are in Colorado where I now live. In Indiana, I ran Blizzaks on my 996 and they performed well. Winter there meant packed snow on the roads with occasional ice. There weren't too many deep snows. In Colorado, we get so much sun that the snow is generally gone after a few days, leaving dry roads. The temperatures are very cold, but the roads are frequently dry. I run Pirelli Winter Snow Sport Sotto Zeros in Colorado and they work very well. In either case, the 911 stays in the garage on deep snow days.

I drove my 997 C2 through one winter and it did great. This was in Boston and near-by suburbs. The best part was when it snowed, most people stayed indoors and I had all the roads to myself. I have good snow tires and had no issue leaving every traffic light ahead of any 4x4. Now that I live in suburbs I am a little worried about unplowed roads, other drivers, but mostly about the chemicals they use to melt the snow. I got quite a bit of corrosion just from that one winter.

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Other dumb peeps.... x2 sorta. I live in Chicago and I think any urban environments where streets are plowed religiously and salted, you can get by most of the time. OTOH, if you're in a rural area, you're taking your chances. Then there are those that classify winter driving as only driving in the winter when it's not heavily snowing at the time. A member here awhile ago was bragging about his new 996tt and how he was gonna drive it in Chicago winter. Sure enough, he got into an accident and now KC owns it.j/k KC Point is there are a lot more appropriate and suitable cars out there and even if you can handle your car ok, it's the others I don't trust to ruin my pride and joy.