Page 415 - NIXBOOK

And sometimes the instructors would bring out a special skid car set up, which was a 4 wheel mechanical dolly rig that went
under a training car. It could hydraulically lift the car tires off the road a little or a lot in any combination to reduce the tire’s
surface area contact. When the tires were lifted almost all the way off the ground the traction went to just about zero and that
would of course cause different kinds of skidding that we’d have to learn how to recover from.

The EVOC instructor had a control panel in the passenger seat and he could adjust the thing to lift the front end of the car up
on the fly, so to speak. Or the back end. Or both. Usually the officer driving would not know which was going to happen until
it was time to start turning and things went literally sideways fast. Not only was that terrifically fun training but it also
programmed us how to quickly react to skidding without wasting time panicking first or thinking about which tires were losing
traction and how to recover an out of control car.

Sometimes we did our EVOC driving training in the dark and sometimes in the winter and if it happened to be snowing at that
time, oh well that’s all the better.

I remember once hitting the course in my 2000 Ford Expedition when there was a good two inches of icy snowy slush coating
the entire course, and I got to drive as fast as I could, which rewarded me with giant solid waves of thick slush getting thrown
up several feet out from the front wheels.