Very few people actually use SUVs for this and many modern ones aren't even that good at anything beyond a rainy day.

What sort of little bubble do you live in? Where I live people get pretty good utility out of their sport utility vehicles! We have had a ton of snow this winter, including a couple of storms where having ground clearance was key to getting around. The snow was coming down so hard that the plows couldn't keep up. I saw who got stuck and who didn't in that big storm. The interstates were a mess, secondary roads had 2' banks where plows had only gone through in one direction. Front-wheel drive cars and minivans were stuck everywhere, as were tractor trailers, RWD cars without snow tires, and so forth. Everything AWD was still moving pretty well.

Now if you're saying people with true low and high range 4wd trucks and SUVs don't go rock crawling with them that much, that's probably true, but those vehicles have a lot of utility doing things like pulling a boat trailer up a wet boat ramp, driving on a frozen lake to go ice fishing, and driving on farm roads or other unimproved surfaces.

Which only means they have additional value off road, not on the road. The entire premise of having a road is to avoid difficult driving conditions.

Having lived in both places, commuting in northern New England this time of year often means that you're not driving on a surface a Silicon Valleyite would consider a "road"

Yeah, living in the Midwest I've actually encountered potholes where, if I drove my Fiat over them at any speed, would literally swallow the entire wheel and likely render the car undrivable without major repairs. Not only does an SUV/pickup have bigger tires, they're also made for driving over incredibly rough terrain. Solid axles and four-wheel drive mitigates a lot of those issues.

AWD cars are great, I own a Subaru that does fine about 90% of the time.

There are still days that it stays at home and the trucks and SUVs come out because the snow depth is above the bumper.

Who said I live in MA?

>Who said I live in MA?

Statistics/stereotyping said so. If I guess that every New Englander on HN is from MA and lives east of 495 I'll be right far more often than if I pick some other place in New England.

>There are still days that it stays at home and the trucks and SUVs come out because the snow depth is above the bumper.

I've lived in all three of the northern New England states and currently live in MA because money is more important than happiness right now.

I was kind of looking forward to telling someone from MA that you don't need more than AWD car amounts of ground clearance on roads that never get more than 5" of snow between plows. Even in northern New England it's very rare for there to accumulate more than 6" of snow on public roads except maybe a few days a year and even then only in the most rural areas.