Any car enthusiasts here?

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Greatly apologize for writing so much

Tyre width and depth. It all depends on the conditions one intends to drive in (And of course, the vehicles weight and other factors also come into it).

Tyre depth. A shallow tyre depth with a higher pressure and stiff sidewalls gives better grip on dry smooth roads.
Wet roads need a softer tyre wall and a greater depth to grip, as they can flex more where the tyre is less likely to slip.
Now offroading or snow etc is a whole different area.
My experience in offroading is confined to bicycles when I was both employed as a bicycle mechanic/sales assistant, and I was also involved in mountain bike racing in the earlier years before suspension arrived. (It was just coming in on top end mountain bikes but was still rare as only the top teams or the wealthy could afford it. It was rare to see more then 2 bicycles with front suspension in a typical race of 60 to 100 riders).
Tyre choice was crucial as to get it wrong and one could on occasions find one may as well run with the bike on ones back.
If the course involved sand, we would need the widest and deepest tyres which we could find and fit. The more balloony, the better as the softness effect tended to spread on the sandy surface and gain grip.
Heavu clay type mud (Which this area in Wales was famous for.. Remember the gentleman called Steve Baker? The famous mountain bike champion from the USA in the early years? He was the world champion (I think I have his first name right) and he came here to the clay areas of South Wales and had not realized how tough going the conditions were. He finished in a low ranked position amongst some of the armature cyclists as it was a whole new experience for him. He was in his element in semi hard fadt trails where split second directional decisions were needed. A very different enviroment.
Now in this heavy clay enviroment, we ran a wide tyre (In those days a 26 x 2.125) on the front which would both absorb the bumps (No suspension) and ride on top of the surface of rhe mud, but as most of our bodily weight was on the rear wheel, if we ran a wide tyre we would just slip around on the top and not get any grip (Also a wide tyre would send heavy clay onto the chain and clog up the teeth on any 7 speed freewheels or cassettes (5 and 6 speed freewheels were not effected as they had better spacing). The answer in these conditions was to rin a narrow ( Preferably a 26 x1.5) as the narrow tyre would sink below the wet clay type mud and gain grip lower down.
With offroading motor vehicles these two similar approaches are seen. Either go wide and soft to float over the surface or go thin and hard and sink to find the solid material underneath. The early Landrovers were built with farms in mind and therefore they had narrow tyres which were designed to sink and find solid material to grip under the surface of the mud... And as long as one has the ground clearance to do so, this approach works fine, as one does not slide across the top of the surface and loose control.
It all depends on the conditions one is intending to tackle and the vehicle one is driving. Many modern 4WD vehicles lack the ground clearance which was once common to see, so they have to have wide tyres to float on top of the mud or sand. By design they have no choice. But these 4WD vehicles were designed to be more road going vehicles with offroading as a possible after thought, so a low ground clearance made road handling much safer and it would cope with less demanding offroad conditions.

Now we come to snow. I don't know if anyone has seen the snow tyres used on rally cars? They start off wide near the rims but then go quite narrow when it gets to the actual tread. The actual part of the tyre were the tread is, happens to be about a third of the width of the wheel. The bottom part of the tyre itself reminds me of the width they had with early cars. (Those early car builders knew a thing or two about what was needed to drive on those early mud and gravel roads! Hence narrow tyres with a high ground clearance enabled them to get from A to B on roads which... Well. Lets just say that today one would only consider it if one drove a more deicated offroad vehicle!)
But think of the principle behind those snow tyres on rally cars. They wanted a tyre which would sink through the snow to reach the more solid road surface underneath. The weight of the car on such a narrow area was amplified... And if this didn't work, the tyres were much wider higher up where the wide wheel rims is, so if the snow was deep, the car would float on the upper edges of the wide bits of the tyres and therefore prevent the belly of the car being grownded in the snow as rally cars, by the nature of the need to keep a fast pace, usually only have the ground clearance they need and nothing more. (They rely on plating underneath to compensate for the odd occasion where the ground may occasionally come into contact with the underside of their cars).

Tyre depths and widths are an interesting choice.

Another aspect I have learned through cycling on the road is wider tyres drag more then narrow ones. We used to sell 17mm width tyres (700c) for racing bike use. I used to ride 19mm tyres for time trialling and 22mm width on the tandem, but most tyres on racing bikes were around 25mm wide and 28mm to 32mm wide on touring bicycles. I personally found a 28mm tyre to be not much slower then a 19mm or a 22mm tyre (Though many purists would frown on me for suggesting this!)
However, in recent years with many experiments with todays computers have worked out that the best tyre width for racing and time trialling use to be 25 to 28mm wide and here is why. On an dead flat glass like smooth road then a 17mm tyre with a high pressure would give the least drag and give a ice skate like grip on the road surface, but in reality, what was happening was few roads offored this mirror like road surface. Most tarmac had a more stoney type surface which if one was using a narrow very high pressure tyre, one was spending more time floating over the surface rather then gripping, and also the tyre grip was balooning when it came into contact with this road type surface. This balooning effect was in effect widening the tyre with as it came into contact with the semi bumpy tarmac surface, where the computers found that not only did a 25 to 28mm tyre grip better in these tarmac roads, but it was less likely to give the balloon effect at the point where the tyre was touching the road. Think of the weight of the rider and the bicycle touching the road and when it came into contact with tiny bumps in the tarmac the narrow 17mm tyres would deform to be come wider and actually give more drag where the slightly wider tyres which were slightly softer as they didn't need such a high air pressure to keep their structional integrity were found to not deform so much on a typical grainy type of tarmac road.
So in effect, my origional observations in rhose days were right where I actually found the slightly wider 28mm tyres to perform just as well as the narrow 17mm tyres that the racing purists were using. (And a good deal comfier over bumps too!)
If all roads had a glass like surface, then yes, the very narrow 17mm tyres were the ones to use which were not only narrower but they were lower profile too.
Now going back to cars. Wider tyres drag more as they have a lot more width but too narrow also lacks grip in dry conditions. Wet conditions and a softer deeper tyre with more flex will grip better.
All depends on the conditions.

It is a bit long and I then had the deeper side of a partial shutdown just while I finsihed writing it so I was not able to edit it to shorten it.

TY Jakki.

Went to go get a haircut in the next town over because they have an awesome barber who does it for cheap, so I took the old Corolla and set out. It's just a five-mile trip. What could go wrong? What indeed.

Not wanting to drive through the intersections and all that on the highway I took a dirt road. It's kind of a shortcut. And kiting along down the dirt road at about 25 or 30 per hour I ended up losing control of the car. The car began to fishtail; I overcorrected the wheel and it slid the other way. Then again, and it just kept sliding. I only had traction on the front and the back wheels were just skating around on the loose gravel. I was thinking "let's just keep going" but physics was playing a little game of Tokyo Drift with my ancient economy car. I'm not a very good driver.

There was a jolting, sliding crash, sounded like the time the postman ran over the neighbors' garbage barrel, and the car hit something pretty solidly and pitched over forwards. I looked up and saw nothing but blackberry brambles over the hood and the car was leaning at a crazy angle to the right, so I shut off the motor and got out. The car had run off the road into the ditch, crashing into the dirt berm (which slowed the machine enough to stop it) and leaving the left-side rear wheel up in the air. I get out and start wondering how much body panels will cost for a third-generation Corolla.

Well, no choice now but to "Get out and get under." Dad had told me some good old Redneck-style Wisdom long ago about how to extract a stalled automobile from the middle of absolutely nowhere, using no tools but what's on the car and your wits. The name of the game is MacGyver.

Once the sunken side was jacked up I pushed wood under the tire. There was a train track nearby (Mountain Goat would like this) and I got some splintered pieces from a crosstie that was sitting there. Then I got some dead logs from the pine forest that was surrounding me and started putting them in there too.

Unfortunately the car couldn't pull itself out. So I jacked it up a little further and added more logs, making a "corduroy road" under the front wheel. On the other wheel I used the passenger-side floor mat, and I also dug out a bunch of the dirt with my hands to get it where it wasn't resting on part of the car. I didn't want to knock the oil pan off the engine out here in the middle of the woods! After building a road on one side, and laying out the industrial-rubber carpet for the other, I restarted the engine and put on a little extra power.

To my surprise, like Venus from the shell, or the phoenix from the ashes, the old Corolla rose from the ditch and sat there idling in the road; a bit dusty, but unscathed. I looked under the hood--engine was fine. Under the fenders--even the little mudflaps were intact; the fenders had not bent, but had plowed right through the dirt pile the way a freight locomotive goes through a stalled pickup truck. (seen that happen.) There was dirt all over everything but it was intact.

So I went and got my haircut.

That evening I realized my cellphone was missing so I took a shovel & went out to go look. I moved some logs around and got to digging and turned it up right there--it had fallen out of my shirt pocket when I was jacking up the car. The Corolla has a hand-crank scissors jack, not a hydraulic one; it takes a bit of spinning and I must have cranked it right out of my shirt. Anyhow, I had built the improvised ramp right over the top of my phone and then run it over with the car twice as I was backing out.

My old car has been rear-ended at a traffic light, chased off the road by an 18-wheeler, backed into a ditch by mistake, decided to run on three cylinders once, been used as a moving-van, and left me stranded twice in the middle of nowhere. Not once has it ever failed to get me where I was going or to get me home. The Corolla is truly the stuff of legend.

Oh, and my phone survived!

good ol' corolla thank the engineers who designed it and the assembly line techs who properly and durably assembled it.

I’m a big car guy, mostly into American cars from the 1960s and European and Japanese cars from the 60s and 70s. Don’t own anything special right now, just a 2016 Toyota Tacoma pickup, which I enjoy.

A 2016 Tacoma is a nice truck. They're very reliable and have enough power to get around. Stock, accessorized, or custom?

the newer chrysler corp. pick up trucks, they seem to have figured out that they can make them ride smoothly over rough pavement, without disturbing cargo-carrying or handling. if only they weren't so blinkin' bulky.

I am going out in my little Mitsi to destress and go on a scenic drive to get car parts. I have the next years car insurance sorted.

I love cars. I especially love Volkswagen cars of all species. I love other German cars as well. I also like old British cars.

some old american pig iron is very rare. in 2 decades i've seen precisely ONE amc Pacer. can't remember the last time i've seen an amc Gremlin or AMX or Ambassador/Matador or Hornet/Concord or anything by AMC for that matter.