When it comes to accessibility, a four-wheel drive car is the obvious choice in winter. A car with four-wheel drive is also less likely to skid and slide on slippery surfaces.
With this in mind, four-wheel drive can also be assumed to be the obvious choice for those who want to drive safely in winter.
However, this is not necessarily the case, according to Folksy.
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Four-wheel drive is more dangerous in winter
That you have more control on slippery surfaces if the car is four-wheel drive may have happened, but despite this, Folksam’s study shows that four-wheel drive cars are significantly more involved in accidents.
More precisely, the risk of an accident on slippery surfaces increases by between 20 and 30 percent if you drive a four-wheel drive car instead of a two-wheel drive car, according to a Folksam study from 2017.
On dry or wet road conditions, however, the accident risk is the same for two- and four-wheel drive cars.
Therefore, the risk of accidents increases with four-wheel drive
That the accident risk for four-wheel drive cars is higher cannot necessarily be derived from the fact that they offer poorer control on slippery surfaces, but rather that you do not notice as clearly when the road surface is slippery.
In a two-wheel drive car, slippery surfaces are noticed relatively early, when the drive wheels start to spin more easily than in a four-wheel drive car.
Something that supports this theory is that the speed tends to be 10 percent higher when a four-wheel drive car crashes, according to Folksam’s statistics.
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Gives a false sense of security
In other words, four-wheel drive provides a false sense of security that can lead to more accidents.
– The results suggest that four-wheel drive masks slippery road conditions. Better road grip during acceleration means that the driver does not adjust the speed to the road conditions. When it is time to brake, the speed is higher and thus the braking distance is longer, because a four-wheel drive car does not brake more efficiently than a two-wheel drive.
It said Matteo Rizzitraffic researcher at Folksam, in connection with the presentation of the study.
If you drive a car with four-wheel drive, it is not necessarily time to switch to two-wheel drive for safety’s sake. Rather, it is about being aware of how the car can mask how slippery it actually is, and adapting your driving style accordingly.
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