A state of dirt roads
Most of Vermont's road mileage is unpaved. That is not a rural curiosity — for a large share of drivers here, the first and last few miles of every journey are gravel or dirt.
Unpaved roads add abrasion to every failure mode a paved road has.
- Boots and seals. Grit is thrown continuously at every rubber boot on the car. A torn CV boot on tarmac is a race against time; here the joint has already ingested abrasive by the end of the week.
- Air filters. Engine and cabin filters load at a rate no service interval anticipates. Check them by looking, not by counting months.
- Brake hardware. Dust plus moisture plus salt residue becomes a grinding paste around caliper slides, which is why slides seize here on cars that have never seen a coastal road.
- Wheel bearings. Water and grit are being worked at the seal constantly rather than occasionally.
Mud season
In spring the frost comes out of the ground and unpaved roads turn to deep mud for several weeks. Sections become genuinely impassable, and the ones that do not are ruts.
A suspension in mud season is being displaced through its full travel repeatedly rather than jarred once. That is what ends dampers, tears control arm bushings and finds any ball joint that was already marginal.
Paved roads are not spared either: the same freeze-thaw cycle lifts and drops whole sections, leaving humps and broken edges rather than holes.
The grades
The Green Mountains run the length of the state and the gaps across them are sustained climbs and descents rather than hills.
A long descent is continuous heat into the brakes with no interval to shed it, and the failures are fade, then boiling fluid, then a pulsation afterwards from uneven rotor cooling. Brake fluid absorbs water over years regardless of mileage and boils lower every year — testing it takes a minute and it is the item that decides how a descent goes.
Engine braking is free and it is what the low gears exist for.
The inspection finds the rust
Every vehicle is inspected annually, and in this climate the item that turns an inspection into a large bill is corrosion. Brake lines, structural corrosion at rocker panels and suspension mounts, and the exhaust.
Brake line failure is the one that matters most. Steel line corrodes from the outside under clips and it fails when full pressure is applied — which is the moment somebody needed it. A pedal that has gone slightly longer over a season is an inspection of the whole run, not a top-up.
Long distances and cold
Outside Burlington the distances are real and the winters are severe. The parts worth replacing on age rather than on failure are the ones that end a journey: battery, starter, alternator, water pump, belt and tensioner. None are expensive. All of them leave a car somewhere cold.
What the rules and the weather here actually say
- Does this state inspect your car
- Every registered vehicle is inspected once a year, and the inspection takes in wheels and tyres, steering and suspension, brakes, lights, glass, body, exhaust and fuel system. Vermont Environmental Conservation, read
- Emissions testing, and who is exempt
- Emissions are checked statewide as part of that same annual inspection, with an electronic read of the on-board diagnostics on anything sixteen model years old or newer. Vermont Environmental Conservation, read
- What goes on the roads in winter
- The salt on the road is sodium chloride, the same compound as table salt, run alongside brine and sand, with magnesium chloride added once it drops below 15°F. VTrans, read
- The climate, in a number
- Rutland takes around 75 inches of snow in a year, and Waitsfield up in the Green Mountains more than a hundred. National Weather Service, Burlington, read
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