4WD Unexpected Behaviour

JeepFan said:

Yes,. it's mostly because your foot was not on the gas. The torque converter clutches have not locked up, and as far as the car is concerened you are just creeping slowly forward while waiting in queue at some traffic light.

The tractrion control system has to sense how to apply torque by monitoring wheel spin and gas pedal. If no wheel is spinning at the expense of another and the gas pedal is not being pushed to drive forward, the car will behave as you described.

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Thanks, JeepFan. I feel better. My pride's still hurt mind you.

quasimodem51 said:

Thanks, JeepFan. I feel better. My pride's still hurt mind you.

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Hey! You bought a Patriot. That should be plenty of pride right there all by itself.

you need to take another run at it you feel better when you make it.

Example of different snow conditions

If your CVT2L is working properly, I would expect it to handle that situation just fine. I ran my 2008 CVT2L through some pretty rough snow and ice situations around the beginning of March, and they seemed a lot worse than the pictures you posted.

1) While test driving my Pat, I drove it through my yard on Feb 14th in W. Michigan. This was in an area where my snowblower tosses a lot of extra snow, and it gets packed down a lot. I didn't measure it, but the skid plate was plowing a bit of snow. I purposly stopped the vehicle to let it sink to see if I could get it unstuck, and I learned a bit about how the traction control feels. It was like the power was being sucked right out of the engine. I got it unstuck by putting it into 4WD Lock in Low and rocking a bit while turning the wheel in opposite directions when in forward and reverse. After a couple forward / reverse cycles, I got some momentum and drove out while the undercarraige sounded like ice sliding off a steel roof ( I was on the verge of being high centered when the tires sunk a bit more in the snow). The snow condition: several heavy snows with about 3 thaw and freeze cycles intermixed. Created about 4 inches of hard packed course crystalline icy snow, with about 4 inches of heavy "snowman" snow on that, toped off by a couple inches of fresher moderately fluffy snow (easy to shovel, but still can't be blown off the hood with your own breath).

2) March 2nd: Tried out some unmaintained roads, and a couple that had only been used by snow machines lately. This was after a severe thaw that knocked down a lot of snow, but it froze solid again and was just about solid ice underneath, but with a crystalline transition to some heavy wet snow on top. I guessed there was about 6-8 inches total, but the skid plate still hit a couple of times when driving in some ruts a couple of places. In one location I drove up a section that someone had driven with a big-arse truck a few days earlier and tore up some pretty good fish-tailing ruts. These were of course frozen now, and covered with 3-4 inches of fresh snow.

I have been thoroughly impressed with the Patriot's capabilities in the snow, and am also impressed with the stock Goodyear Wrangler rubber. I think these tires are a good match for this weight vehicle, and really stay planted as if the Pat were a much heavier truck.

I did also drive into a very deep heavy snow bank just to see what it could do. In this case it seemed that the Pat ran into the lack of power issue as I was creeping in to not get high centered. It was like getting into heavy mud as the wheels just wouldn't turn any more even after increasing the throttle slowly to the floor. A larger engine would have spun and sunk the front tires and likely cased a bad situation. I was able to simply back out without problems, and I could see the two deep quarter-moon impressions where the front tires just quit turning, and also where the bumper had pushed in the bank above that.

I have seen conditions that I don't believe any typical 4WD truck can pass. Usually this involves solid clear ice that has frozen completely before getting a healthy dose of dense heavy fine dry snow on top. (It might be easier to explain all this if I knew the 100 different Inuit words for "snow", as there really are so many different snow variations, it is many times difficult to compare apples to apples.)

I may have some more winter testing completed after a trip to Michigan's Keewenaw at the beginning of April. There will be some huge snowbanks beginning to melt at that time, and a lot of the sled trails should be getting too messy for all those other CVT driven snow machines by then. In collage, a buddy of mine took his 4Runner up Brockway Mountain Drive, and we were the first up the snowmobile trail that spring. Another trip like that would be fun, but I think I have outgrown those days when we could have easily had one long walk back to the main road.

It's getting late and my grammer is degrading rapidly, so I'll shut up before my post turns unintelligible (and likely mis-spelled). I hope some find this worth reading. I'll try to remember a camera next time I'm out.

Good Night.

next time, just floor it up the driveway and ease on back lol, sorry to hear you got stuck, and wish I had a neighbor as considerate as you. Glad I don't have to worry to much about the snow... moved down south. But it saddens me too that the pat got stuck on ya I spent many of times having to dig out my oooooooooolllllllllld pos camry till i just started flooring it over the plow bank and hoped I could make it the rest of the way.

AMCNUT. I was unaware there was a software flash for the CVT2L. I thought it was for the CVT only. I will definitely check that out. Thanks.

UP_2TRACKER: Thanks for sharing your experience. As I walked back over the area, I firmly believe I was high centered on the windrow created by a snow plow in a previous snowfall. That is, the windrow I high centered on was now a very hard icier pack that the freshly fallen snow. The front wheels drove up over and landed on snow covered ice - glare ice. The back wheels probably were not fully on the snow hardpack. I think I might have been able to fit my hand under a rear wheel for example. The rear situation was just covered up by snow. Only the front wheels dug in and down until the glare ice. As they did, I think the Patriot was ever so easily raising up its rear end and the front end was falling. The Patriot would not rock at all. It just didn't move. I was high centered. When I got towed backward, I could here the scraping on skid plates.