I love my 2006 Toyota Prius, like a father loves his son; like a geek loves his shiny. It’s got power under the hood. The interior is more like flying a UFO than driving a car. It gets great gas mileage. It has a lot of cargo space. What’s not to love?

Well, winter in a Prius is not to love.

Here’s one of the ways in which a good hybrid like a Prius is much better than a normal car: braking. You hit the brakes, but most of the braking force doesn’t come from calipers crunching down on discs on your wheels. The braking force comes from the electric motor free-spinning to act like an electric generator, creating electricity from slowing down the car. It not only keeps the brakes from wearing down, but much more importantly (to me) it keeps the braking force more in the center of the car – on the transmission – than on the wheels themselves. This means a lot less skidding, loss of traction, etc. It’s a much safer way to brake than just locking up wheels. (Or in the case of modern cars, with anti-lock brakes, not locking up the wheels by not braking.)Now because the Prius basically uses the electric motor as a brake for most of the braking force, this means that the actual wheel brakes in a Prius are, well, tiny. They’re just not needed for much, so tiny does it. Incidentally, this is also why a Prius should not tow a trailer. It has no brakes! It has more than enough power to pull something along, but it has no ability to safely stop the car and a laden trailer. So the Prius hybrid shouldn’t pull a trailer, but otherwise – for just itself – it has great braking.

Except, at least in the Prius, there’s one fatal flaw: traction control. Now the traction control on the Prius has a lot of owners grumbling for other reasons, but none so bad as when a Prius is braking on ice. When the traction control of a Prius kicks in, in order to protect the sensitive hybrid synergy drive, it drops the generator braking entirely. So those very undersized brakes that normally aren’t used for much, are suddenly the only thing stopping the car. And when you’re already breaking on treacherous traction, the last thing anyone needs is your braking force on the transmission where it’s stable vanishing into thin air and your wheel brakes clamping down in a sudden shift of braking force. Onto brakes clearly not designed to stop a car of that size all by themselves. And the slightest slip of traction from a single wheel will cause this very dangerous shift in braking force.

Talk about a design flaw!

Well, what can you do? You can control how much traction you have, that’s what you can do.

If you have the money, own a car like a Prius, and are driving on snow and ice, I highly suggest getting new tires. Good tires. The stock tires on a Prius have all of the traction qualities of a low-energy (no traction) tire, but without the low-energy rating. Worse, the standard Prius tire width is only 185. Only if you go up to Touring do you see 195. Why not 205? By many accounts, it fits. Just research the right radius to keep the rotations as close to stock as you can. But even if you don’t dare leave the factory width, for goodness sake get better traction tires. There are plenty of tires out there with better water and snow traction. Find some. Drive safely.

I love my Prius, but I’m no fool. Nothing is perfect.