If there’s heavy snow in your location and the road becomes slippery, it will be much harder for you to handle the car. The common solution is to use interlinking chains that you wrap over the wheels. You usually secure them in place using tension clasps. In general, snow chains are affordable and they are easy to install. However, traditional snow chains have some limitations. First of all, chains can fail in some situations. Because the car is always in motion, these chains could get entangled with the suspension struts and the axles. In more serious cases, your car can be damaged, which is costly for the car owner. Also, traditional snow chains are known to cause damages on the allow wells. The wheel rotates continuously and these chains are hand on the side wall of the tires. These chains could cause scratches and scuffing on the wheel. When the winter finally ends, it’s not uncommon to end up with battered-looking wheels.
However, traditional snow chains are inexpensive and this could attract people to choose them instead. If this happens for a longer period of time, chains could cause dents to the wheels and body work, if the car has low clearance. Eventually, you may find out that these snow chains are not worth the potential risks. It should also be noted that traditional snow chains could break when used on hard tarmac. Because hard tarmac and icy surfaces may occur intermittently, this situation can be quite tedious for car owners. Some producers claim that their snow chain product has self tightening or self adjusting system, but in reality, it is still time consuming to fit the snow chain in the real life situations.
Another solution is to use snow shocks. It is essentially a fabric material that covers the entire wheel. It can provide good traction on icy surface and snow. This is a good solution in areas with intermittent snowy surface, because there could still be hard tarmac surfaces within your route. However, there are common complaints that these snow socks rip quite easily if the car is driven on hard tarmac roads for too long. Again, this could cause a tedious experience, because you won’t know about the actual road condition in front of you. When these snow socks finally fail, they could wrap around the suspension arms and axles. It would be a real pain to remove them.
The next option is to use a self adjusting system that can be quite expensive. These streams are attached to a couple parts of the wheel. First of all, the system is fixed permanently to the hub and you can leave that on the car during the remainder of the winter. Then the system is attached to the heavy duty chains themselves. As the wheels rotate, the chain will become gradually tighter. Unfortunately, the system may cost up to $350. This can be a good investment if you are worried that you may damage the car due to torn off snow chain or snow socks. Unfortunately, there’s a problem that you can’t find a self-adjusting system for larger wheels. Many sports and luxury cars are using larger wheels, so there’s a chance that these cars are completely unusable during very cold situations.