Hey guys,
Last year we moved to an old farmhouse almost a mile off the road, with a crappy unpaved driveway going across a cornfield. The driveway has lots of potholes and other general lack-of-smoothness, is gravel mostly, and gets pretty gross when it rains. The area we park/turn around is partially gravel, but a lot of it is worn away so it's dirt which turns to mud when it rains or snows/thaws.
Our cars are a 2001 Volvo V70 (FWD model) and a 2005 Kia Spectra5.
The Kia has never gotten stuck (only in snow and only then because I was stupid). It's pretty much fine.
The Volvo on the other hand has been a giant pain in the ass. It got stuck once in *very* minor mud last year near the road when trying to turn around. A towel to help one wheel gain traction was all it took to get it going, but it really seemed like it shouldn't have gotten stuck at all. In the last few weeks (spring thaw and fair amounts of rain), it's gotten stuck a total of four times in pretty bad mud, always while trying to turn around near our parking area by the house. I've gotten it out by various forms of annoyance and effort: a tow strap wrapped around a tree and cranking it out with a come along, tricking a group of lost boy scouts to push me out together, towels for traction, and once by calling up a damn tow truck.
The Volvo is more susceptible to this bullshit than the Kia for a few reasons. One, it's a longer car that takes more doing and going further off "the beaten path" to turn around. Can't change that, and any similarly-sized vehicle would have a similar problem (and we do need a similarly-sized vehicle). It's front wheel drive, as is the Kia, but with where it's gotten stuck, I think it would have been able to get it under its own power if we had power to the rear wheels too. I figured out today that the tires on it right now (225/45/R17) are slightly smaller than what the car should have (235/45/R17) which means the car sits slightly lower than it otherwise would. Officially the ground clearance is about the same as the Kia, but in practicality it's a bit lower, and also more susceptible to that being a limitation due to its size.
Of course, the real solution would be to pave the area by the house, but that's not going to happen (landlord had a specific clause in the lease basically saying that "yes, we acknowledge the driveway is garbage and we will not cry about it.") We could get a truckload of gravel dumped in that area, or go super ghetto and put down some plywood or something, but I don't know the best way to go about doing that either.
One thought I've had was to put larger (taller) tires on the Kia, maybe "grippier" ones somehow that would be less susceptible to getting stuck in mud? Light-duty offroad tires maybe (100% of all non-driveway driving is on perfectly fine paved roads, but 100% of trips out of the house begin and end on 3/4 mile of this unpaved driveway)? I've even thought about swapping it out for the AWD version of the car (2001-2007 V70 XC) which has two extra inches of ground clearance as well.
Can someone reality check me here and help me figure out what our best options going forward will be to avoid this recurring?
None of this happened at all last summer (barring the one time the Volvo got stuck in light mud, but we've adapted our habits and know how not to do that again), and I'm sure in a few weeks once it's warm enough that everything dries out faster this won't be an issue but it's a colossal pain in the butt and I don't want to deal with it for a month or two next spring either.