Icy roads make winter driving dangerous. Ice is slippery, causing cars and trucks to skid out of control. You can safely explore how cars slip on ice by making a model of an icy road and testing out how well toy cars drive on the ice.

What you’ll need

  • Water
  • A shallow pan (like a cookie sheet)
  • A few toy cars
  • A permanent marker

Directions

Build a model icy hill.

  • Fill the pan with water and place it in a freezer for several hours or overnight (or if the temperature is below freezing place it outside).
  • When the water has frozen, set it on a table top or floor, and prop up the pan to create a slight incline.
  • Use the marker to draw a road on the ice, from top to bottom (like in the picture below).

Toy cars on a frozen sheet of ice.

Once you have a pan of ice with a road drawn on the surface, you're ready to test out whether your toy cars and trucks are likely to slip. 

UCAR

Make your own experiment. 

  • Decide what you want to test! What makes a toy car more likely to slip (or less likely)?  Here are some ideas for slippery experiments:
    • Perhaps you want to figure out if some toy cars slip more than others.
    • Perhaps you want to compare the types of tires or the size of the vehicles.
    • Or you can leave the ice out of the freezer for a few minutes until a thin layer of water forms on top and see if your toy cars are more likely to slip (as Sheldon Drobot explains in this video).
  • Once you know what you’d like to try, write your hypothesis – a sentence that states what you think will happen.

Test your hypothesis. 

  • Now that you have your hypothesis, it’s time  to test it out. Send the cars down the slope and see what happens!
  • Remember to repeat your experiment a number of times to see if you get the same result each time.

Several toy cars on ice

These cars slid all over the ice. 

UCAR