Uh-oh

No doubt the whole of the south of England will grind to a halt under this stuff, to the amusement of people who get REAL snow.. but a rear wheel drive sports car with no snow tyres is not exactly ideal for these conditions.

Frozen Roadster II

Big fat tyres + only 800kg in weight = no traction.

Couldn't even get the Roadie out of the drive this morning on the snow! Fortunately, Mrs Dynamoo's rather heavier Rover 25 did.

Still, it's funny seeing all those people who've spend a fortune on BMW X5s and X3s to discover that they've got all the offroad capabilities of a milk float in this weather. :)

Frozen Roadster

A chilly minus eight degrees overnight.. and a tricky problem for my Smart Roadster. After opening the passenger door, the darned thing just wouldn't shut properly.

Now, the Roadster has a design fault in the door where (I understand) there is a pin holding in part of the mechanism which is basically mounted upside down, and this drops out which means that the door cannot be opened from the inside. Smart's first fix for this was to glue to pin in.. but of course, the pin will still work loose eventually and has a tendency to drop out again. I mention this because Smart's measly 2 year warranty would mean that this might end up as an expensive repair.

The problem was simpler than that - it looks like the very cold weather had frozen the mechanism in place after it opened. About three buckets of warm water over the door unfroze the mechanism and it started working properly. This led to another problem.. a clean bit of the car. So, the Roadster ended up with an early morning bath (as pictured).

The next problem is how to deal with the threatened six inches of snow in a car with only about four inches of ground clearance..