Let’s imagine you’ve found yourself in a situation that every driver dreads: you’ve set out in your vehicle on a cold day with light snowfall, tiny flakes that are so small it looks impossible they could stick to the ground. You drive a couple of miles and conditions remain the same, so you decide to push on down a remote highway that stretches on for hundreds of miles before you reach your destination. But then a snowstorm hits, and before long you find your wheels spinning and your vehicle comes to a complete stop. What do you do?
The National Weather Service warns that leaving your vehicle to look for help in the middle of a snowstorm is incredibly dangerous. Even if you are wearing the correct gear to keep yourself warm outdoors, with heavy snowfall it is easy to lose your bearings and you can become disorientated, meaning that you may lose sight of your vehicle and find yourself stranded in the snow. The best thing to do is to stay in your vehicle and wait for the storm to pass, and to keep the vehicle as warm as possible. Their advice is to run your engine for 10 minutes every hour to warm the vehicle while opening the window occasionally to ensure to dissipate any buildup of carbon monoxide. You should check the exhaust pipe occasionally and clean out any accumulation of snow that may block it up.
