Someone Tells us how your car did in the snow!

Here in MI, I just drove about 40 minutes in rush hour on surface streets on stock 20-inch wheels/tires. Temperature is just below freezing, but the ground is cold enough the roads were snow covered. Snow is coming down in big flakes at the time. My frame of reference is a previous 2008 Outback/H6 and current MK7 VW GTI. With both cars, we switch to Blizzak winter tires around the end of November through March.

The Ascent seemed to have decent traction moving forward from a stop – no problem. The new tires really helped cut through the snow with around 1 inch of snow cover. But, both turning and stopping were not great when the tires couldn't break through to pavement. During more snow I would be really cautious. Near the traction limit, its huge bias for understeer was clear – it just plows through turns. This is one of the main reasons I switch to winter tires. I was happy that I could rotate around corners with a bit of right foot similar to how the Outback behaved. I wasn't sure how front-biased the Ascent was in comparison, but plenty of torque makes it to the rear quickly. The Ascent is a larger car than I'm used to, but I had the sense it would do a good job keeping things going straight and safe.

We have a set of Blizzak DM-V2 mounted on 18-inch wheels ready to go on this weekend. That should make things pretty solid. Would be great to hear other opinions.

I live in Montana, last week the weather coated the roads with a layer of ice followed by snow. There were multiple accidents across town. I ended up sliding my Ascent uncontrolled through 2 intersections before getting the message to drive really slow. While the Ascent was trying to brake it maintained its direction, it also perfectly maintained its track accelerating on this really slick surface.
The really exciting stuff happened at the weekend when the nearby mountain pass was effectively shut down due to crashes, slide offs and trucks without chains. We decided to take another route over the pass, a mountain road I had driven several times in summer but never at night in a snowstorm. We would not have completed this trip without the following on my Limited Ascent: bright headlights, steering responsive headlights, paddle shifters. The bright headlights were great since the road surface was totally white with no other vehicle tracks, the minor road also did not have any reflector posts, there were no buildings or any other source of light. The steering responsive headlights were absolutely essential driving around the tight bends. On the many descents, touching the brakes caused the Ascent to slide so I finally got to use the paddle shifters. If I did this trip again, I would have the top display show which wheels were engaged and the slope of the vehicle since in the total darkness you had no visual clue if you were going up or down. I also would have had the GPS on and zoomed in as much as possible so I could see any bends/intersections ahead.