lol right? Like, folks would take their ford escort up a road like this up a 30 degree incline, and only when it had an inch of black ice on it did they start thinking maybe to park at the bottom rather than try and get it up the unlit street after dark
I drove my Honda Fit all the way up a very bad Forest Service road (big ruts/potholes/rocks) when I couldn't find my Beloved, who I was supposed to be meeting at a campsite.
The kids on dirtbikes were pretty surprised when the old lady in the straw hat came up out of the bottom.
My family has an annual Christmas party at the ranch with a similar gravel road as the driveway. The only problems people have ever had were running out battery. We jump started the Ferrari with a Suburban, but the Tesla required a little more engineering with a power box.
both our driveway and the unmaintained road that served about 10 houses in the unincorporated rural area we lived in were far worse than that, and we had a nissan hatchback
I suppose this is the mindset that leads to the massive demand for crossovers and off-road capability.
No understanding that actual cars can successfully negotiate dirt roads.
Less can be more, and once this was more well-known. The Citroen 2CV, basically designed to be what we today call a side by-side comes to mind. Or Beetles, and the old two-stroke Saabs, beloved in backwoods Maine.
Of course CA is the land where, what in the rest of the world is known as a Cold Front with some rain, becomes an apocalyptic storm, that for some unknowable reason actually leaves you sitting in the dark despite the lack of high winds.
I'm not bitter.
Truth.
A combination of TV (etc.) hyping each season's rains as Stormageddon IV: Darkness Approaches, and PG&E taking a private-equity / asset-stripping approach with decades of deferred maintenance on its infrastructure. But, CEOs gotta make their millions somewhere, right?
I remember my first VW Bug, old as dirt when I bought it, got me home during a snow storm with inches already on the ground and I was navigating stuck/stalled cars on hills and the highway.
Mom once got to be the Last Person Across Wyoming in one of their windstorms, in a Bus. Semis parked next to the interstate all the way down the route, some on purpose, some... not.
Yeah, the places I got into with my Bug (and later a Honda Civic) when I was young and enthusiastic would have made this Cybertruck driver wet his pants
So true. Years ago, under a massive snowfall, I crossed Switzerland with a Toyota Starlet. I couldn't count the number of large, heavy cars blocked in the highway due to the heavy snow. I simply kept going at 50-60 km/h. It felt good!
I once watched a Range Rover driver pause cautiously over a puddle in a dirt road like this. I'm thinking, lady, your car was designed to traverse savannahs, you can make this puddle.
In retrospect, I think she was worried about getting her car dirty.
The engineers would be deeply shamed.
I remember reading a review for one of the early Range Rovers where the reviewer dinged it for not having a cup holder and thinking that they had entirely missed the point of the vehicle
I think that was an early sign that the current SUV culture was emerging
One of my all time favorite car magazine's head to head's was an early Suburban vs. Expedition and how well a dog could sit on the center console next to the driver in each. Given my dog at the time refused to sit elsewhere in the '92 suburban I drove, I was very interested in this feature.
(I was in a rollover accident in a '99 Explorer in 2011 and miraculously our dog who was sitting on my husband's lap survived. Since then every pooch in any car I drive is strapped in. My heart dog in the suburban would be horrified.)
Yup. The number of people that insist that they need high-clearance AWD SUVs here because "it snows" is just ... exhausting. They live in suburbs! Where the metro area has seven-figure population! The roads are cleared in six hours!
I grew up in an area where the soil is pretty rocky and roads like this commonly sprout large limestone rocks after a rain. I could usually get down the county roads in my Honda Civic, but private roads were often iffy.
We've got a 00. Far fewer miles, but had almost no work needed on it. I've taken it on far worse roads.
Best car I've ever had. Pretty sure the drive train will outlast the apocalypse.
When I drove across the country in 2009 one of my observations was that SUVs were common from Philly to Minneapolis and again from Coeur d'Alene to Seattle, but in the areas in between (including the Bad Lands and Rocky Mountains) they were way outnumbered by like, ten year old Buicks sedans.
