Depending on the car you have and the region it’s sold in, you may have spotted a little snowflake button sitting somewhere near your gear shift. You might be wondering what it does, and even more so if you’ve also got another snowflake button in your car, sitting near the climate controls. The short answer is that it turns on a dedicated Snow Mode, a driver setting that tunes your car for snowy and slippery conditions.
In that kind of weather, it’s very easy for your wheels to spin too quickly and lose traction, so to make up for that, Snow Mode makes your car slower to react when your foot lands on the accelerator. At the same time, the transmission changes its habits, shifting into higher gears earlier than normal – so early, in fact, that it sometimes pulls away in second gear rather than first. Even the traction control, which you should never turn off, gets jumpier and steps in sooner, especially when it senses a wheel losing grip. In Hyundai’s version (available on the Tucson, Venue, and Santa Fe), the wheel spin is checked every fiftieth of a second, and if one tire starts to slide, it quietly shuffles torque over to the others, helping keep you pointed where you actually meant to go.
Snow mode comes in various flavors
Of course, plenty of other brands offer the mode besides Hyundai. On Toyota and Lexus, you actually get proper buttons. Hop into a Highlander, for instance, and you’ll see a Snow button right on the center console, sometimes badged ECT Snow. Lexus uses a near-identical button or switch. Subaru runs its own take too, only it badges the whole thing X-Mode instead of Snow. It’s actually mostly older cars that slap the snowflake symbol on the button, though, like the Saturn Astra.
On most other brands, the snow mode is tucked in alongside their other drive modes. Hyundai routes it through Drive Mode Select, while Ford spins it onto a rotary dial, where it’s sometimes called Slippery Mode. Then there’s Land Rover, which folds it into a combined Grass, Gravel and Snow setting. The mode may be badged differently as well, like Winter or a plain W. On newer models, you may not get any physical button or dial at all and might have to dig through the touchscreen menus to find it. However it’s presented, it basically works the same way across companies, mostly softening the throttle and reining in wheelspin.
When to use snow mode
As for when to use it, the rule of thumb is pretty simple. It’s meant to be flipped on the moment the road turns nasty, whether that’s fresh snow, packed ice, or freezing rain. It also helps when you’re crawling up a slick hill. And some folks even use it in mud, if there’s no dedicated mode for that, since the same low-grip logic applies. The setting is usually pretty flexible too, and you don’t necessarily have to be parked to switch it on. Volkswagen, for one, lets you jump into Snow Mode mid-drive.
As for the other side of things, the mode doesn’t do anything that’d make it unsafe under normal conditions. Still, running it then is pointless since it dulls your acceleration and quietly eats into your fuel economy, so it’s best to flip it off once the pavement is dry. Just keep in mind that it isn’t magic. All it really does is make your car a bit less excitable so it doesn’t get away from you. It won’t save bald tires or rescue you off a sheet of ice. For those more extreme cases, you’d be better off fitting your tires with some of the best tire chains.
