Snow now more slippery or are cars less grippy?

[FhakeConcern]

Seeing all the OMG SNOW KAOS on every forum and social media and also looking through some old photos made me question what's going on here.

The two pics that made me start this were of the street where I lived in Brixton during the 80s showing pretty thick snow and the same street showing my XR3i AFTER I got back from a round trip to Maidstone in blizzard conditions.
XR3i after driving to Maidstone & back.

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Same street looking from other window

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I remember coming up Wrotham hill on the way home and wondering if I'd make it, but having no problems. There were a few stuck vehicles on the way, but nothing actually got in my way until going up the hill at Crystal Palace which was congested and when the traffic came to a halt. The Peugeot 505 GTI in front of me couldn't get going it just kept going sideways until it nearly hit the kerb. I got out and jumped half on the boot and he managed to drive off, I got back in the Escrote which started with barely a spin of the wheels. As you can see from the pics, it was pretty thick snow.
Now at the time I thought it had fat wheels and tyres, but in retrospect not so. I don't know what they were, maybe 185/70 ? I'm going to tag @Warren t claim & @NorfolkNWeigh as it's the sort of thing they seem to know. If so that's similar to Mrs Concern's Renner Moodus, hardly a performance model!
Also I don't remember there being such a thing as "winter tyres" & "summer tyres", we just had "tyres". I know some perverts had the so called Town & Country tyres in the 60s, but think they'd died out by the 80s. So was the compound much differnt in those days or were lighter, more basic cars actually better in poor road conditions?
Most cars now are also FWD like the Escort so what went wrong?
I also found this one from a few years before outside my parents house in Beckenham, which reminded me how we would drive around in various Minis in the snow and never get stuck despite some snow so thick the low ground clearance meant the front acting like a snow plough and nearly lifting the wheels off the ground!

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[christine]

Most tyres today look meaty enough when new but at 1/3 rd worn are just 3 band slicks.! xr2 came with pirelli P6 tyres, i assume the same for xr3 ? , with a decent tread across the whole width of the tyre

[christine]

All the abandoned cars today seemed to be mainly BMW and Audi ... wide low profiles .. big heavy cars .
Tall skinny tyres on lightweight cars are far better in snow .
I was astonished earlier this year , when pumping up my tyres at a garage 28 , 24 145x 12 mk1 fiesta , a driver of bmw behind me needed to put something like 45 or 50 psi in his tyres ? I said that can't be right ? When i googled it when i got home it WAS in that ball park ....
Last night we were stuck in a queue for 5 hrs on the A26 Tunbridge Wells to Crowborough .Cars stuck in snow .. I let my front tyres down to abot 20 psi while waiting ..still had wheelspin but i didnt get stuck

[mercrocker]

Probably some frightful bingbonging would occur had one of the modern owners tried the pressure trick, no doubt resulting in some apparently unrelated failure of another programme at a later date.

[christine]

Some slut in front of me in a Bini cooper , couldnt get up any of the hills on the A26 .. I had to keep getting out to push it .. telling her to saw the steering wheel .. she evetually turned round and gave up .I was in our golf 4 auto , thats on 175 80 14s summer tyres, .but it is a heavy 4 door car . I managed without a push ...still with some wheelspin . Blimey a 2 ton Range rover came on 205 16s originally , nowadays , a Corsa has 205 s !

[Hooli]

185/60R14 on XR3is with 5.5J runs I believe. Hence I put 1600E rims on my onion, they looked better and we're 6J so handled better as the sidewalls had less bulge

/Nerd.

[christine]

That said , winter snow tyres are unreal in the snow ! My golf was on winters until 2 months ago , then i had a couple of punctures , the car is nearing the end of its life , so i put a new set of the cheapo chinky tyres on it ! Twat i am ..

[Eddie Honda]

My 343 has Vredestein Snowtrac 3 tyres. Grips like fuck at this time of year. Fan-fucking-tastic!

[Hooli]

And you only need to mover 57 other broken cars to get to it.

[Scruffy Bodger]

We do have extremely varied conditions to other countries tho? Some snow you can pack to an ice block in seconds and it'll bloody someone's nose if you hit them in the face with it, to right the other end of the range where it's so dry it won't compact into a snowball, much like you get in Canada or on the Continent. The really dry stuff simply evaporates, it doesn't even get slushy and certainly isn't particularly slippy.

Add that to the fact it can be icy here for days before snow because of the damp and you get a perfect combination of ice/black ice underneath and things can get really fucking slippy!

Reminds me, actual black ice didn't seem to be a thing for many years where I am, totally invisible in the right* circumstances. I remember being totally oblivious to it until I came across a big, slow moving queue up a big bank my me. Happily doing 60 in my Carlton, confused by why they were all going so slow, thought I wonder, slowed, throttle in second and it span right up! Momentum had completely obscured the fact I was driving on ice.