Our view from a cabin at Mammoth Mountain, California.

I hadn't skied in 20 years, but I felt that I owed it to my two kids -- who had never seen a real snowfall in their lives -- to make the 5+ hour journey from L.A. to Mammoth Mountain Ski Resort. Since it was time to bring my 2002 Honda Odyssey in for service anyway, I took the car in the day before we left to make sure it was in tip top shape for the journey. I also bought snow chains.

Apparently, "chains" now come in two varieties -- the old fashioned kind that are actually made of chain link, and "cables," which are made of, well, cable. After striking out at one auto parts store, I found the ones I needed at Pep Boys. I also picked up a snow brush/ice scraper and a can of de-icer spray. I thought at the time that perhaps it was overkill. Boy, was I wrong.

As we climbed the eastern Sierras and the air turn colder, snow began to appear on the hill peaks. But then, simultaneous with our vacation, southern Cal was hit with a really wet storm that lasted for days: inches of rain for L.A., and buckets of snow up in the mountains. It snowed the whole time we were there. Great skiing, but challenging driving.

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Sometimes in our car reviews, you'll read that a vehicle's chassis has been redesigned. But what exactly are we referring to when we mention a chassis?

A chassis is the supporting frame of an automobile along with the suspension, steering and brakes but not including the powertrain, body panels, doors, roof, windows and accessories.

Think of a human skeleton with its major working organs but without the heart, lungs, skin and hair.

The term comes from the French word châssis meaning "frame" and can also refer to the body of a human being.

Picture Schwarzenegger at the end of the first Terminator movie. No more Arnold, just a futuristic chassis.

The Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky use the same chassis but they both have two powertrain options and you can get both with either a manual or automatic transmission. But as you can see in the above photo, they have very different styling.

We at Edmunds.com have been talking about the usefulness of stability control for the last 5 years, and yesterday the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) released a report that backs up that sentiment with some hard numbers:

-Stability control reduces single-vehicle crashes (the majority of them, rollovers) in SUVs by 49%. In cars, the drop is 33%.

-Fatal single-vehicle crashes dropped 80% in SUVs, 77% in cars.

-For all types of fatal crashes, stability control-equipped vehicles reduce the risk by 43%.

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These are two terms you always find in our car reviews. You'll see something like this: The 2006 Honda Civic makes 140 hp at 6,300 rpm and 128 lb-ft of torque at 4,300 rpm. But what do these terms mean?

Horsepower is a unit of measurement of power, used in the automotive industry to express the rate at which a car's engine is able to perform work. One horsepower is equivalent to lifting 33,000 pounds one foot in one minute. One horsepower is equal to 745.7 watts, which is simply another unit of power. The term "horsepower" was coined by Scottish inventor James Watt. (The term "watt" was named for him.) As engines replaced horses, a term was needed to quantify the amount of power that could be produced. Thus, "horse" power was born and has since been adopted to express the power of "horseless" carriages.

Torque is defined as a force applied over a distance. It is a measure of an engine’s ability to do work, usually expressed in pound-feet. In engines, speed is not measured as distance over time (as is the case with vehicle speed) but in revolutions over time (rpm). Think of the car's wheels turning as it moves forward, or the spinning of an engine's crankshaft. This rotational motion, combined with torque applied for a certain amount of time, results in work being done. Torque itself doesn't actually produce motion or work, but is a component of horsepower, which is the rate at which work is done. Imagine trying to open a locked doorknob—you are applying torque, but because there is no motion, there is no work being done.