No, we’re not going crazy on you; putting socks on your car is actually a good idea, as long as you put them on the tyres and donlt waste too much time looking for the feet!
According to Dag Anders Moldestad, (nano)friction specialist at AutoSock AS, it helps the car climb even the most slippery slopes in the parts of the world where snow and ice is a seasonal mobility problem.
And speaking of snow: Dag Anders (above donning his ‘cunning look’) spent 9 years preparing perfect skis for the Norwegian olympic skiers before doing his PhD in Friction & Arctic Technology and then joining AutoSock. This gives him a snow and ice vocabulary that immediately puts him in the Inuit Hall of Fame!
We tried the socks ourselves (or rather our car did) after talking to Dag Anders, and, yes, they work! The AutoSock is produced by the Norwegian company Tele Textiles AS, and is distributed more or less everywhere where snowcovered roads might be a problem.