GRR Garage: Nissan X-Trail – battling the French blizards

Four of us bundled into the big orange beast ready for what turned into a much longer journey than we expected. The Gendarme's solution to the tricky conditions? Taking the autoroute down to a single lane on the way toward the capital so they could stack lorries in the outside pair  – if you've never seen bored truck drivers having snowball fights and building snowmen, you've missed out.

Thankfully our Nissan X-Trail is loaded with mod-cons. So the -3 temperatures in Paris this week, and the freezing cold of pre-dawn Sussex, were unable to dampen the spirits. Heated seats front and rear are, quite frankly, a godsend.

For the first time in a few weeks we even turned the automatic 4x4 system on, having been saving fuel in two-wheel-drive mode in recent times. The French are great at clearing their roads of mounds of snow, but sometimes they do leave just a single lane for traffic. Thus having a working 4x4 system is useful when you find yourself stuck behind a 205 doing 20mph on a motorway. 

Steer the X-Trail into the snowier side of the road and you can feel the rear wheels coming into play as the grip reduces rapidement. If there was ever an advert for why people are buying four-wheel-drive cars in 2018, it is a snowy France and a big orange Nissan. 

MPG this week: a rather snow-hurt 32.