As someone who grew up in an area that gets a lot of winter driving conditions and has a bunch of car handling training (dry, rain, and winter specific): you didn't "calmly pilot" anything, friend.
You hit ice, you're a passenger until you're no longer on ice. The car is mostly a 2D projectile unless you're on studded tires. You were lucky, that's it.
And, I might add: you lost control of the car. There's a whole chain of failures that led up to that point: not being aware of forecast weather, not being aware of changing conditions, and so on. Folks experienced in driving in winter weather know how to watch the road for signs of icing, how to test for traction that's getting worse, how to be smooth with controls, and how to recognize that a control input is starting to cause the car to lose traction. You fully lost control.
It is a common joke among instructors teaching car handling skills that the worst students are the ones who have played driving video games. They're overconfident. They don't actually know much at all about car handling techniques. They have no motor skills that good, fast driving requires. No "butt sense" - reading how the car feels, sounds, and acts as it approaches or exceeds the limits of traction.
"I safely handled losing control of my car in icy weather because I played Super Mario Brothers decades ago" is almost but not quite the best example of Dunning-Kruger effect I've seen in an HN comment in quite some time.
completely agree here. As someone who has done a fair amount of snow and ice driving in some quite unpleasant conditions never once have quick reflexes helped: low speed, correct use of controls (copious use of engine braking, starting in higher gear etc.) and the ability to make small measured corrections have seen me all right.
Even then I've come close to crashing three times (would have been a small crash though) twice due to slopes that weren't safe to descend given the conditions and once because a family of deer crossed the road in front of me, i was not able to correct course to avoid them or use the brakes - doing either would have led to me losing control - luckily i was doing < 15 mph and the deer stepped out of the way at the last second.
You hit ice, you're a passenger until you're no longer on ice. The car is mostly a 2D projectile unless you're on studded tires. You were lucky, that's it.
And, I might add: you lost control of the car. There's a whole chain of failures that led up to that point: not being aware of forecast weather, not being aware of changing conditions, and so on. Folks experienced in driving in winter weather know how to watch the road for signs of icing, how to test for traction that's getting worse, how to be smooth with controls, and how to recognize that a control input is starting to cause the car to lose traction. You fully lost control.
It is a common joke among instructors teaching car handling skills that the worst students are the ones who have played driving video games. They're overconfident. They don't actually know much at all about car handling techniques. They have no motor skills that good, fast driving requires. No "butt sense" - reading how the car feels, sounds, and acts as it approaches or exceeds the limits of traction.
"I safely handled losing control of my car in icy weather because I played Super Mario Brothers decades ago" is almost but not quite the best example of Dunning-Kruger effect I've seen in an HN comment in quite some time.