Poke a button on the dash or twist a pair of hub locks, and your faithful truck is ready to crawl along ice-greased winter roads or plow through differential deep snow.
Cool. Now, how about you?
From November to March, as much of North America goes into cold storage, drivers must shake the mothballs out of their winter-driving skills. As a truck or sport/ute owner, you have a leg-up on most, but what happens when an overnight nor'easter pummels your camping adventure, leaving you with four feet of snow to punch a hole through on the way out of the woods, or a late-afternoon freezing rain puts the icing on rush-hour commute, turning a 4x4 into a 4000-lb hockey puck?
According to the experts, driving a truck through winter's worst is no gamble if you know when to hold and when to roll. That means drivers need the confidence to keep their foot off the brakes and the common sense to keep speeds in the basement.
"On icy roads, the biggest thing is to slow down," says Greg Nikolas, chief driving instructor at Land Rover's driving school at the Equinox resort in Manchester, Vermont. "Trucks and SUVs tend to be heavier and tougher to slow down. You can go better, but you can't stop better than a normal passenger car."
Mark Cox, an SCCA Pro Rally racer and director of the Bridgestone Winter Driving School in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, reminds drivers that smoother is always faster.
"SUVs are great because of their weight, traction, and ground clearance," Cox says. "But it's a double-edged sword. A lot of front-to-rear/side-to-side weight transfer and a high center of gravity can make trucks and SUVs tougher to handle than cars. Once things start to happen, a driver has to be quick to correct. The main thing is to maintain your momentum and change directions gradually. Be smooth."
When your intent is to move forward rather than sideways on an icy road, the experts say first make sure your 4x4 is in four-high.
"A lot of people in trucks and SUVs don't use four-wheel drive," Cox says. "If there is any question, use it."
It's also possible to be too cautious. "If you're on the highway in four-low, you could get to the point where you're the hazard because you're going too slow," says Nikolas. "I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a vehicle in four-low on a main road."
If your truck is equipped with the aforementioned hub locks, you'll probably have to supply your own anti-lock brake system, too. Nikolas recommends engine braking whether or not you have ABS, which means slowing down and leaving plenty of room between you and the next car.