Here’s what you can do if your car starts to skid

Rain, fog and falling temperatures will make for slippery roads in the near future. It’s best to adapt your speed and tires to the weather, but what do you do if the car starts to skid?

When it is slippery, car tires have less grip on the road. This sounds like a big deal, but some drivers still forget about it. So reduce your speed.

slow down

Let’s say you’re driving around that nice curve on your way to work at about 50 mph in dry weather. On slippery surfaces, this is too fast for the tires to grip and you will have to reduce your speed to, for example, 50 or 60 km/h.

keep distance

It’s also advisable to keep a lot more distance from the car in front of you than you normally would in slippery conditions. Because your car’s tires have less grip, the braking distance increases.

Two types of slippage

But even if you do everything right, it can still happen that you get into a skid. Then you have the feeling that your car is slipping at the front or back. Because there are two types of slip: understeer and oversteer.

Understeer is when a car slides straight over the front wheels in a curve. Oversteer occurs when a car loses traction at the rear and swerves.

Understeer

Understeer is the most common. Most modern cars are front-wheel drive and are designed to slide over the front wheels when there is insufficient traction.

Luckily, understeer is the easiest to absorb. If you feel your car slipping straight ahead or toward the outside of the curve, immediately release the accelerator and turn the steering wheel slightly back to the center position.

This gives your car a chance to regain traction. When you feel that the grip is back, apply the brake and steer in the direction you want to go.

Annoy

When you oversteer, the rear wheels lose traction and the car threatens to reverse. If this happens, immediately ease off the accelerator, keep looking in the direction you want to go, and steer in that direction.

In other words, if the back of your car swings to the left, you should steer left. If you go to the right, you steer to the right.

Please note: Do not look at the obstacle you are sliding towards, but keep an eye on where you are going. Don’t steer more than necessary because overcorrection can cause your car to suddenly turn the other way.

Braking when skidding or not

The general wisdom is that if you start to skid, don’t brake, just ease off the accelerator and maybe even depress the clutch. This allows the tires to roll freely and regain their grip.

Security expert Mark Maaskant says otherwise. “Just brake! Modern cars have an anti-lock braking system. Cars start to skid because the speed is too high for the given conditions and you slow down by braking.”