Leaf going into emergency shut-down while sliding on snow

Hi all,

I have a steep driveway and after the wet snow and ice from the blizzard here on the east coast, I've been fighting to get up to the charger attached to my house. I have more success with a running start and traction control off, but sometimes it takes a few tries. At one point when I thought I was going to make it the dash permanently turned on the traction indicator and forced a shutdown. It wouldn't switch back to "ready" until I cleared some snow around the tires, though I suspect it was more an issue of giving the car time to sit. Has anyone experienced this before?

Most likely ABS module registered one of the wheel sensor "malfunction" - that might happen
if one of the tires is spinning not according to the speed vehicle is moving for too long.
Fault is cleared with restart. Nothing special. It may also reset if you drive straight and all
sensors get the normal rotation data for few moments.

arnis, have you experimented with pulling fuses for ABS or TCS for performance driving?

If the whole car shut down, I'd guess a weak 12V battery.

VitaminJ said:

arnis, have you experimented with pulling fuses for ABS or TCS for performance driving?

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Noup. Just switching off traction control actually switch off traction control and stability control fully.
I use hand(foot)brake to drift. There is no reason to lock the front tires. Foot-brake still locks rear wheels if ABS is active.

AndyGT02 said:

Has anyone experienced this before?

Click to expand...

I have. My first winter (January 2013) I was messing around with the traction control off, marveling at how you can go from 0-90+mph (indicated) in a split second by stomping on the accelerator in slippery conditions, when after 2-3 tries at that the car went in to N and wouldn't go back in to D or R. I sat there for about 20 minutes trying to get it going, when finally it decided it was ready again and drove like normal. I thought some sensor had gone wonky and took it in to the dealer, but they scanned it and didn't turn anything up. Since then I have avoided that kind of behavior, and have not seen a repeat of this issue.

I too have a slippery uphill driveway to navigate, and the running start from the street is definitely the way to go. I honestly find that the car gets up it better with the traction control engaged most times, since it balances traction left to right that way. Sometimes when it is really bad the traction control will just sputter to a complete halt, and then you do have to let the wheels spin a bit, but I kind of feather it like the old days to keep the wheel speed in a reasonable range (<40mph), and as I said have managed to avoid this particular shutdown condition.

I always recommend getting dedicated snow tires. The worst snow tires will give you much better traction in the snow than the best "all season" tires, and I'd bet that goes double when you throw low rolling resistance in to the mix...