I'm on my 3rd winter with my FR-S and while I've been making it through each one, the car clearly has a number of short comings when it comes to winter driving.
- It's too low. Even at stock height, I hit a lot of chunks of ice and snow that most other cars breeze over. I don't even want to look at the condition of the underside of my front bumper. It's also sketchy as fuck when you're in a blizzard on the highway with trucks tailgating you and speeding past you.
- It's too light. The car is squirrely almost all the time when there is snow and ice on the road. It's also a bitch to get going from a stop especially when starting off on an incline.
- RWD does make it more challenging to stay in control despite what others might say. This, again, could be related to the lightness of the car but sometimes I just get tired of having to be constantly aware that the rear end might swing into the lane beside me when I take a corner. I don't even have to be going very fast for this to happen.
Now would I change any of these things about the car? No, definitely not! They just make it a little more interesting each winter but I can tell you that if I had a second vehicle with AWD or 4WD, I would rather be driving that over the winter.