Ice

Hyundai has released a cool video that features Patrick Bergel, the great-grandson of Sir Ernest Shackleton as he tries to complete his grandfather’s famed trek across Antarctica. The original 1914-1916 mission left Shackleton him and his team stranded.

Subaru took a WRX STI to the Alps and asked driver Mark Higgins to drive the car down the world’s oldest bobsled run. The run the modified STI drove down the 6,076 foot-long St. Moritz olympic bobsled track, which falls 426-feet over the length of its run.

Jaguar Land Rover recently launched a new program that lets fans of their vehicles experience them like never before – driving sideways on a massive ice-covered lake Northern Sweden – the same lake that car companies have been using for testing vehicles in the most extreme winter driving conditions since back in the 1970s.

You don’t have to look far to find proof that many drivers out there simply don’t have the skills needed to handle all the power a Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat can put down. With 707 hp on tap, driving a Hellcat on dry roads is a challenge for many.

Mazda recently invited me and a number of journalists to the frigid, snow-covered roads of Crested Butte, Colorado to learn how their vehicles handle in extreme weather. While I’d love to talk entirely about the time I spent hooning around the ice in a MX-5 Miata, that was simply icing on the frozen cake.

To promote its NX SUV, Lexus commissioned the artists of Hamilton Ice Sculptors to create a set of wheels and tires made entirely from ice. The finished product is pretty cool (see what I did there).

I recently had the opportunity to drive the Range Rover SVR, and it truly is one of the most impressive vehicles I’ve driven this year, offering the full off-road capabilities of a Range Rover, combined with the heart and soul of a sports car.

Porsche makes some of the coolest and most iconic sports cars in the world. Perhaps the best of all the modern Porsche street cars is the 918 Spyder. The car is a 887 hp hybrid beast and is incredibly fast.

Red Bull’s Frozen Rush 2015 kicked off this weekend at Maine’s Sunday River Ski Resort, and the racing looks to be incredible. What could be better than pairing heavily modified, 900 horsepower Pro4 trucks with the icy slopes of a ski resort in Maine?

Trophée Andros is an incredible racing series that takes place on ice-covered tracks in the French Alps. But perhaps the most interesting event that takes place during the series is the Trophée Andros Electrique, in which electric cars race head-to-head over the ice.

Volvo V8 Supercar drivers Scott McLaughlin and Robert Dahlgren, fresh off the Volvo Polestar Racing victory at the Melbourne Grand Prix, flew to the Northern Hemisphere and Volvo’s winter testing grounds to get behind the wheel of a 2015 Volvo S60 Polestar.

While we’ve had quite enough of the snow and ice in the Midwest this winter, we might have a different opinion of it if we got to do what these guys in Sweden did. For a recent challenge, Audi put DTM champions Mattias Ekström and Timo Scheider behind the wheels of a couple of Audi RS 6 Avant quattros, and set them loose on a racetrack carved from a frozen lake.

Ford’s rallycross team is preparing for the 2014 Red Bull Global Rallycross Championship and FIA World Rallycross Championship seasons on the frozen lakes of northern Sweden. Ford’s Olsbergs MSE drivers Andreas Bakkerud and Patrik Sandell put their tricked-out 600 horsepower, four-wheel drive Fiesta ST to the test over ice and snow and even over a couple tiny snowmen.

Bentley has done a great job producing vehicles that can not only offer luxury and performance, they also can handle winter driving conditions. In this clip from The Fast Lane Car, they took the powerful Continental GT Speed Convertible into the frozen Colorado Rockies to see how it handles on a sheet of ice.

With much of the Northern Hemisphere covered in snow this time of year, it’s no wonder so many of the car videos showing up on the Internet these days involve driving on ice and snow. And while it’s probably advisable that your daily winter driver is some sort of sturdy 4×4 or at least an AWD, there’s nothing quite so fun as a high torque rear wheel-drive car for slipping around if you’ve got a safe place to do it in.