I’ve gotten cars stuck hundreds of times in my life, sometimes in snow, sometimes on ice, sometimes in mudpits that destroy my engines, but usually in grassy yards that I turn into muddy yards that reduce property values. But yesterday I got my $700 Chevy Tracker stuck on completely solid, flat ground — and that makes almost no sense. I looked like an absolute fool to my neighbors and to passersby — and I mean more of an absolute fool than typically.
Before I even begin this blog, I have to address Project Cactus, because many, many people have been asking about that dilapidated ute I flew all the way to Australia to attempt to fix. A new episode is coming NEXT WEEK, and then the finale will run on Christmas day. I know, that’ll be almost three months from wrench to screen, but we’re doing our best! And it’ll all be worth the wait, I promise!
With that out of the way, here’s a bit of an update on things: I’m back from Los Angeles, where I covered the (rather lively) LA Auto Show for two weeks, not long after talking with #brands at SEMA to see if we can figure out some partnerships that make sense. (I’m really pushing for my drink of choice, PB Blaster). I also may or may not have found a place to live out in LA, despite not having a real plan of execution for my move from Detroit. A shitshow is brewing on that front.
Anyway, upon my return here to Michigan I had to drive somewhere to eat breakfast at 5 P.m. (my house is devoid of any sustenance, and things here at The Autopian are so busy I didn’t have time to step out until late). As the streets have been salted due to a recent snow, I broke out my winter beater, my beloved $700 Chevy Tracker.
I fired up the 177,000 mile J20A four-cylinder motor, popped the five-speed manual into reverse with my left foot on the clutch, depressed the gas pedal a bit, then let off the clutch. There was no motion.
“What the hell?” With my left foot on the clutch, I grabbed the gear shift, shoved it into first, then back into reverse and made sure it was really in gear. I let off the left pedal again with my right foot on the gas — “whirrrrrr.” That was the sound of a spinning tire, a noise I’ve heard all too many times. It was coming from the right rear:
I didn’t recall there being a mud pit in the front yard, so my first thought was that one of my tires had gone flat from sitting, and that my wheel was just spinning inside my tire. Like this:
I’d had this happen before. I hopped out of the little Suzuki-badged-as-a-Chevy, and did a full 360 around the little off-road brute. All the tires looked fine, and what’s more, they were all sitting on solid ground! I stepped right next to the tires, and the grass was neither icy nor wet. I hopped back into the Suzuki, popped the shifter into reverse again, and tried accelerating. The tire just shot up a plume of steam as its tread heated up from friction against the ground:
That little four-cylinder engine revved to the sky, its rusted-out exhaust making a racket that the neighbors could likely hear over traffic on the road out front. There I was, sitting in a car, stuck in my front yard, which was completely flat and solid. I must have looked like a complete fool.
“Maybe someone’s messing with me, or maybe I forgot to take this thing off a jack stand?” I questioned. But no, there was nothing under the car:
Here’s a video of the bizarre situation:
After a few attempts to reverse out of my yard, I heard a “POP!” followed by the vehicle rolling rearward. This made it clear to me what had happened: My left rear drum brake had seized, either from just sitting for the past few weeks, or from all that mud and water that I’d driven through during a recent off-road trip freezing in there and locking everything up. In any case, that left rear brake was causing so much drag that the right rear wheel — which, because of the nature of an “open differential” design, spins despite the left wheel remaining stationary — didn’t have enough grip to get the Tracker moving.
(To be clear, I could have put the vehicle into four-wheel drive, and that’d have solved it. The only issue is that the blood pressure bulb that actuates the front axle is filled with mud from my recent off-road trip, so it’s not working right).
This situation is, of course, a good excuse to link my favorite tutorial on how an open differential works:
The short of it is that wheels on the same axle can rotate at different speeds (and indeed, that’s the main advantage of an open diff — it allows your outer wheels to spin faster so the car doesn’t “hop” around turns), but they receive the same amount of torque, and that’s limited by the wheel with the least traction. This means that, even if I had given my Tracker “the beans” and revved it to the sky, that spinny wheel with less “traction” (that’s in quotes because we’re talking about a seized brake here, not the type of tire-ground traction you normally think of) is only get as much torque as the surface allows, and the thrust from that torque isn’t enough to move the car against that immovable wheel held in place by a stuck brake. Giving the Tracker gas won’t help much to break the brake free, since the immovable wheel’s maximum torque is limited by the spinny wheel’s traction.
Anyway, this is a pretty random little blog; I should sell this Tracker before it actually breaks.
Remember when you had an offer for only $500 less than your asking price? Should have taken the money and run!
Truth is, he backed out for reasons unrelated to my off-road sesh.
While I always enjoy these stories on vehicle failure modes (I mentally file them away so maybe if something happens to me, I can at least avoid the worst-case scenario of being totally clueless in addition to broken down), I really loved that differential video.
It has all the good stuff from the 1950s – stilted cue card delivery, dated even for the time music, dangerous stunts performed solely for your amusement, and I swear the demonstrator guy’s hands were holding a Lucky at some point.
But my favorite part is the working assumption that the general public would be interested in/pay attention to learning for themselves how a machine operates. It wasn’t totally the bad old days.
It says right at the top that it’s from 1937, not “the 1950s”.
David, I once sold a 4×2 XJ (granted, it had a set of winter tires with it). If I can do that, you can sell this little ‘Zuke.
They don’t salt the roads in Los Angeles. This vehicle belongs on salted roads. SELL IT NOW!
also, all vehicles deserve LSD’s
My first thought on seeing the video was that the emergency brake was on, so your explanation makes sense.
LOL, I know this all too well. My car is very difficult to get going in snow even with snow tires. Thanks, stump puller 1st gear and traction control! Thankfully the TC Off button actually works so it’ll one wheel peel until it gets going fast enough to shift into second. At that point the TC and I are friends again. Until the next complete stop.
I once got stuck on a very slightly rocky downhill in my truck. We’re talking subaru difficulty of terrain. Cv died of old age and rear wheel was very lightly contacting the ground. Had to have my buddy give it a few good shoves. Was really funny because if it had been less steep I would have had enough weight on the rears to have traction and if it was steeper I wouldn’t have gotten caught up on the 4-inch rock.
open differentials are very surprising.. did the same thing in my truck once, got off road and one wheel in the air, then you go nowhere..
no 4wd, in that case we solved it by loading the back of the truck with a dozen people (canoe paddlers as it happened) and getting the wheel grounded again..
Then I read up on it and saw the handbrake trick, did not think of splitting the brake cables to get differential braking. That’s a good trick, thanks mrcanoehead. may look into it.
There aren’t any good solutions for replacing the open diff. The Aussie/lunchbox lockers and similar are fairly horrible for daily driving, the good limited-slip differentials are expensive and beyond my wrenching ability to install.
You can see in the last part of the vid — when the camera is right next to the right rear wheel — that during the attempts before it frees itself that the left rear wheel isn’t turning when the car rocks backwards or forwards. The wheel was pretty definitely stuck.
I got my Compass stuck on black ice doing drifts in an unplowed section of a closed down flea market parking lot in the middle of the winter.
Learned that day Compass/Patriots can actually fully turn off traction control, and I had to really let the wheels with no traction (all 4) just spin like crazy to get out of the spot.
I’m now leery of parking lots that are unplowed lmao
I got my Volvo 740 stuck in a flat field of grass once, it was wet and I got zero traction
I think it might be time to consider the blood pressure bulb as a bandaid and not a permanent solution.
That video is fantastic! Definitely going to make my son watch it tonight, and then maybe recreate the whole in Lego, too.
You could have applied the parking brake, which would have applied the brake that wasn’t seized enough to even out the torque between the two rear wheels and that would have got you moving.
When I was a kid, we had a scoutmaster who had an ancient beetle. He used to take that thing everywhere and one of his tricks was that he split the parking brake cables so that he could differentially (get it?) apply either side to keep moving. A poor man’s limited slip.
Levers for individually applying the rear brakes (usually via the parking brake cables, sometimes via the service brake lines) were popular on VW-based dune buggies where I grew up. We always called them fiddle brakes but I understand that they’re also known as cutting brakes or turning brakes.
I got stuck in my driveway in a pretty embarrassing way. I parked on a sunny winter day on a snow-packed driveway. Between the warm tires and the sun melting the top layer the car make little indentations at each corner. That froze over night and it was just slick enough that I could NOT move the damn thing without my 3 siblings pushing it.
Hadn’t you already sold this car before you took it to Holly Oaks?
He backed out!
You should’ve held off on publishing that off-roading piece after you made the sale.
Wasn’t this already sold before trying to kill it in the mud? Waiting for Project Cactus updates is worse than waiting for the Avatar sequels (and those damn sequels keeping James Cameron from approving the blu-ray releases of The Abyss and True Lies. For the love of all that is holy I am sick of the crappy DVD releases for these movies!)
Woohoo! I actually diagnosed this more quickly than David. That’s the first and surely last time that will happen.
(Don’t call me Shirley)
I thought you had that thing sold? What happened, they buyer come to his senses?
The wild thing is: The Tracker has offered the single best ownership experience of any car I’ve ever owned.
It’s cheap, off-road capable, versatile, easy to fix (just got the 4wd system going again!), reliable, reasonably comfortable, and fairly efficient; it is the most underrated 4×4 on the market.
Even better than the Lexus? Maybe the easy to fix part doesn’t past muster on that one, though.
What if, and I’m just spitballin here, what if there was a vehicle that didn’t need fixing?
Then what would they write about on this site? The adventures of Rustman, the Taillight Bandit, and the Mistress of Smart are why I keep coming back.
They really need to update their bylines to use these new nicknames.
That’s crazy talk!
“The wild thing is: The Tracker has offered the single best ownership experience of any car I’ve ever owned.
While, I totally believe you, that statement is disturbing on many, many levels.
But are you moving to LA or not?
If not, great, keep the tracker.
If so, sell it already. So far of all your cars, this one you actually had someone lined up to buy. Since then, you’ve broken it, let the brakes seize, left mud in the neumatics (apparently).
You are actively sabotaging yourself.
Let me set the scene for ya.
‘Twas a biting cold January morning.
2 or 3 days after a heavy snow, and its good and packed down on our gravel lot.
Customer comes to the lot to look at a 2wd Crew cab long bed 3/4 ton Diesel truck we had. I let him know right up front the truck was 2wd, and whatever was left of a posi-trac rear differential worked when it felt like it. It was parked facing downhill a bit, and up against a fence. I told him I wasnt totally sure it would move from the spot it was in.
The gentleman politely told me he knew what he was doing and asked for the keys.
I obliged, of course, and grabbed him a license plate and walked out with him.
The old girl started right up, but as soon as he shifted to reverse and removed his foot from the brake, I heard the inevitable.
Swishswishswishswish. She just sat there, one tire spinning away, the other 3 happily sleeping in 3 inches of hard packed snow.
This is getting too long so I’ll skip to the end: After running and grabbing my jeep, we pulled it free from it’s flat ground prison, and the customer bought the truck!
I’d parked my 2wd pickup at a girlfriend’s house along the street, which was very slightly uphill. It had snowed days prior, but this day was a bright, sunny 50+ degree day. My one drive wheel was on a patch of glazed, wet ice and any attempt to move the vehicle slid it closer and closer to the vehicle parked behind me. Yes, somehow my vehicle was stuck on a day people were walking around in shorts.
Luckily I was able to pile enough people in the back to move it, otherwise I’d have had to try the hail-mary of trying to use the curb for traction without hitting the neighbor’s car.
I’ve driven my KV Mini 1 in heavy rain, through snow, on dirt, and on gravel, all without difficulty despite its roller-against-tire drive system. On a lawn, however, something from the grass will get on the tires and rollers and quickly reduce their interfacial grip to essentially zero, pretty much every single time. Care to guess on what type of flat, solid ground a lot of car shows are held?
https://live.staticflickr.com/1662/24271951193_fd2afe7a7b_c.jpg
For the love of all that’s holy take another shot of PB Blaster and sell that thing.
Isn’t it 4 wheel drive? Doesn’t that work in reverse?
David. Did you forget the whole four wheel drive part? I think the problem would have been solved pretty quick with one shift.
I think the 4WD is broken and this is some weird way of telling us.
Okay I added that in.
Yes, it’s broken.
Well, it’s not really broken. Just not fixed. Mercedes mobile mechanic is on speed dial. Perhaps.
He explains in the write-up why he couldn’t put it into 4WD at the moment. The bulb he uses for 4WD actuation is filled with mud right now
A lot of David’s things are filled with mud.
“filled with mud” appears to be his default setting.
It covers (some) of the rust.
Very obvious it was a brake holding one of the wheels. Please just push that thing off a cliff and end it. What a POS.
One person’s POS is another’s I-don’t-care-if-I-roll-it beater. I’ve a soft spot for Trackers, and I’ve followed David’s adventures with his Tracker almost to the point of obsession. Alas, I do not live in the Midwest anymore, otherwise I’d be in negotiations with the man.
No, I don’t NEED a fifth vehicle, but it would be easier to flat tow — by 300 to 600 lbs — than my Jeep TJ. And, as mentioned, I wouldn’t care if I damaged it, unlike my TJ. Humans, we can rationalize anything.
What OverlandingSprinter said. If you live in any part of the country that gets snow, and especially an area that uses salt on the roads, then any cheap and running car is valuable to someone nearby as a winter beater. Here in Michigan, there are people who actually seek out and buy these types of vehicles in the late fall and sell them in the spring.
To you, this may look like a POS. To others, it may look like the perfect vehicle to keep rust off of their nice ride for another year.
“perfect vehicle to keep rust off of their nice ride for another year”? So you are saying winter beaters are the automotive equivalent of sacrificial anodes? I hadn’t thought of it that way before..
I mean… maybe? That sounds like chemistry so my brain shut off after “anode”.
I haven’t done the yearly thing, but I have watched three cheap cars’ rear quarter panels devolve into swiss cheese over the years so that my old Z will survive through the upcoming internal combustion apocalypse.
Oh, geez, csavino, let’s all be civilized here, no need to be a RPOS (R being for ‘rude’) especially since Tracy’s adventures with such vehicles are part and parcel of this website and make for vastly entertaining reading. This ain’t Road and Track with the latest and modernest in fancy hi-faultin’ SUVs…
How is that thing not a complete POS?
https://jalopnik.com/ might be more interesting for you.
It’s a cheap off-roader. What more do you want?
…..for it to work?
Oh yeah. Hadn’t thought of that. It is a total piece o’ shit.