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Will be traveling in a SUV (Hertz Standard Size SUV), from CA I will be leaving Nov 17 and making it to Nashville by the 21st, and on the way back sometime in Jan.
Should I be buying chains? Anything to look out for? It will be me and my dog, will be making stops along the route. I have done this trip before, but in the summer. Worried about snow and ice.
Welcome to RTA!
I don't believe chains should be necessary. If you are on the road, and the highways get bad, you should get off the road, get a motel room and stay put for a day, no matter which direction you are going.
If this were my trip, I'd head down the 5 south as far as Barstow, then turn east on I-40. Ais you may know, I-40 through AZ and NM rides on higher elevations. The road crews are generally out pretty quickly to "salt" and plow. If it gets bad, they'll close the freeway and you are best off in overnight lodging, waiting it out. Probably more likely in January than in November, from our experience. Just realize that in can get COLD up there overnight, so it's not the best time to leave before sunrise or drive after sundown.
I've driven 40 and 25 several times in Nov and Jan/Feb, and never once needed chains.
Donna
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Your car rental contract probably will forbid the use of chains, so it's probably a non-starter for you.
But as Donna indicated, they likely wouldn't be useful for your trip anyway. If the interstates are so bad that you need chains, then you probably shouldn't be attempting to drive anyway. Pull off and wait for the storm to pass, and for plow crews to make the roads safe again.
The most important, yet overlooked, aspect of safe winter travel is time. You're looking at 4 full days to safely cover the 2300 miles between San Francisco and Nashville. It appears you are giving yourself 5 days - presuming you have all day on the 17th and the 21st available - so you've got a little extra time to work with, which is a good thing.
I wrote a longer treatise on this a few years back but the main points bear repeating. Chains are NOT a cure-all for winter driving. If anything, they make things worse because they give an inexperienced driver the sense that they've somehow done enough to make themselves safe. The only way to cope with serious winter driving is to do it again and again, year after year, and learn how to do it. I lived in northern New England for about a dozen years and never saw anyone use chains. They are only useful on ice and can do serious damage to the wheel wells, which is why they are forbidden on rental cars. The most egregious use of them I ever saw was one fellow in the mid-Atlantic region who proudly showed me his brand new chains on the rear wheels of his brand new front-wheel drive car.
AZBuck