Prius is stuck - traction control?

I would avoid doing that, consider traction mats at the drive wheel(s), or get a tow. There's no button on the dash for it; it's a special mode, explained in the Repair Manual, for shop tests, not for day-to-day use.

 

You could try wheel traction mats, however I don't know how well they work on a Prius... (edit - Mendel beat me to it!)

 

The "Traction Control" in a Prius is misnamed. It is there to protect the drivetrain from sudden high torque situations (a spinning wheel that suddenly gains traction). That is why my current Prius is an AWDe model so that there are always at least two wheels that get some torque and it is less likely to get stuck.

JeffD

 

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As someone who watches lots of auto rescue celebrities on Youtube, most of them turn traction control off as soon as they get in the vehicle and start it up. And I'm always hesistant to do that because damage can be done. But if you call a tow truck because you're stuck, don't be suprised if its the first thing they do.

 

They show up in a tow truck, maybe they'll try towing?

There's no button on the dash; it's a complicated chicken-dance procedure. Do you think they'll know it? Also, if I was in their shoes, I'd be loath to risk it, for liability reasons.

 

As it is around the right time of year to repeat the PSA, when you are driving a Prius in snow, the aim is to look like one of these guys:

and not look like this guy:

All that ice-polishing will rarely be helpful toward getting where you want to go, and can end up getting you very decisively stuck.

In the top two videos (one is a Gen 3 and one is a Gen 2), you can see the role being played by the car's traction control to keep that slippage to a minimum. The driver in each case would have been using a steady, non-excessive go-pedal input.

Your story isn't completely about the traction control, especially the rubber-burning part. Breaking traction to spin a wheel and burn rubber is usually less beneficial than taking advantage of whatever traction you've got, and the traction control normally will restrain a wheel from spinning like that. In this case, you probably caught the TC off guard by giving a much higher go-pedal input than the conditions are right for.

That's close to a fair description of the gen 1 Prius (2001–2003) "traction control": all that system could do was reduce power, which it did to protect the drivetrain from sudden high-rpm situations while a wheel spun.

Starting with gen 2 in 2004, it's a legit traction control system that has individual braking control at all wheels, so it can direct torque from a wheel with worse traction to the wheel with better traction. That's normally going to be a win.


But the traction control isn't, by itself, an autonomous get-me-out-of-this-ditch problem solver. It responds to the driver's input on the go pedal, which it takes to be somewhere close to the right input for the situation, and from there can fine-tune to just discover the limit of available traction and work with it, as the first two videos above show.

That means the driver still has an important role to play, making a best guess at how much go-pedal input makes sense for the situation. Giving much more pedal input than that will back the traction control into a dysfunctional corner, where it first tries to do what the driver said, sees the wheels egregiously spin, has to cut power way back, loses momentum, and goes through all that again. The drivers who run into that most often are those whose instinct is to mash the go pedal hard and hope for that to get the car unstuck instead of more stuck.

There will always be hard limits: even when the driver and traction control are working in perfect concert, some situations just won't have enough traction to get the car out, and something else like traction mats, auto socks, or a tow might be called for.

AWD can help, of course, not because the traction control isn't traction control, but because it doesn't hurt to double the number of wheels that can possibly contribute.

 

A professional who gets vehicles out of being stuck for a living has way more experience with the risks of turning off traction control then we'll ever have. I wouldn't try it even if I was stuck but if they showed up and used one of several different methods to turn off traction control so they can do their job without the tires losing power when they're pulling the Prius out I wouldn't be concerned with them damaging anything as long as they were slow and methodical like they almost always are.

And if you want some super entertaining videos to watch, follow this guy, he does amazing work:

 

I've turned traction control several times on other cars when trying to get up at snowy hill to my house.
What happens is that when the wheels spin the power seems to be cut as well and you go nowhere.
With traction control off, the wheels spin fast and you can make some headway.
This is on snow, not glare ice, which you can forget about.
I've used ashes or sand to get out of my sloped driveway when it was covered in ice.
Maybe dig away the leaves and put sand in their place?
In this case, is there room to rock the car? Maybe back out?
If it was my driveway, I'd MAYBE screw in the tow hook (don't lose the cover, lol), attach a nylon tow strap to it and tug on it with something-a car, tractor, come-along attached to tree (lol), etc. Of course, you'd need two people for this.
Actually, since I have AAA, I'd call them.
edit: That chicken dance is for the birds. The cars I mentioned had a button. My Gen 5 has a button. When you need to shut it off, you need to shut it off. When I turned it off on that snowy hill, I was losing headway, so pushed the button and sure the tires spun, but the snow was flying and I made it up the hill without losing speed.