I wonder why ‘they’ don’t seek alternatives to traditional rock salt.
Metal detectorists can de-rust their finds by dropping them in an electrolyte of baking soda and water and attaching positive and negative bulldog clips from something like a battery charger.
I remember flipping the polarity of an MGB from positive to negative earth so that I could fit a new radio . It didn’t seem to stop it from rusting though.
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We only have pink Himalayan salt on our roads here in Stroud y’know. 
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Cost! Airport runways and some road bridges use crystalline animal urine for treating frozen surfaces I believe which is less corrosive but more expensive.
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Unfortunately not. Salt retains moisture which is then trapped in all the nooks and crannies including the inside of untreated sills and chassis members. Even on a dry winter day, if salt has been spread, treated roads rarely dry, especially in the shade.
Frequent pressure washing underneath the vehicle and especially under the wheel arches to remove salt and crud can reduce the effects of corrosion but avoiding winter driving completely is really the only answer but I appreciate this is not practical for most people. Interestingly, my daughter has been travelling in Australia over the last year. Many of the surfers who drive their “utes” on the beaches use an oscillating lawn sprinkler under their vehicles to wash them underneath afterwards.
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Council tax revenue and Council budgets should have car undercarriage preservation as their number 1 priority. It would be the case if I got a Councillor ‘job’, and selected the highways section to ‘work’ at.
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Yes absolutely!
I was referring to the, “avoid salt altogether” thing. Condensation will do the job on a brand new car that has never been driven. 
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Agreed! Salt can raise your blood pressure in more than one way and is best avoided if at all possible!
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I believe, from memory, some but not all “salts” used in Japan is some sort of granular non corrosive rock grits & sands, The whole idea I think is to marginally raise the road surface temperature above ambients and surface to induce melts. But not everywhere. For some stretches, under tarmac heating is employed from natural geo spring waters (!) and in urbanised areas….warm water is sprayed. Also, salt is used, but yes they do use salts as well if needed. Anyway…I read this many years back.
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I think this is why buying Japanese imports (used/ second hand) are more favourable since it hasn’t driven on salt roads!
Should be less rusty in theory.
Would be nice to have this tech on our cars then.
Nor do they use them as we do….thanks to impressive public transport systems.
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I noticed that this year in Epping we had white salt being spread instead of the pink coloured salt. It turns out this white salt is better for melting ice than mined rock salt, which has impurities like clay in it and leaves a residue afterwards, whereas the white salt is cleaner and more expensive as it is marine salt made from evaporating sea water and comes from warmer countries.
Just a note on the rusting. In a previous life I restored classic cars and had a couple myself one being a Mk 3 Spitfire. We used to go to Brooklands on their New Year Day meeting, and one year I checked the weather here and it was okay so drove down to the M25 with roof down, when we got onto the motorway it had been salted. When I got home that evening I went out with buckets of water and gave the car a thorough washing in the dark a may add, and put the car away. A few weeks later I went and checked it. The car had wire wheels on it and where every spoke entered the rim rust was forming and the the wheel arch had small rust spots where the under seal had little chips in it that hadn’t even noticed. After all that I drove my ND Icon as a daily driver for 4 years and washed it roughly every couple of weeks and hosed the underneath in the winter, never noticed it getting rusty. The replacement ND was was driven in all weathers until this March when I put it in the garage when we got the new Defender and it became a bit of a pain getting them both on the drive. What I’m getting at is, just enjoy them.
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When I had a NISSAN Elgrand as a new import, it was mint underneath. Even though a '59 plate (imported in Aug '23), and 70K miles.
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I understand your last sentence, but I just couldn’t bring myself to take our MX-5 out on salty winter roads. Rather like the bikes I owned, it is purely for pleasure and driving in winter = zero pleasure! I even cringed when driving a well used daily driver on recently gritted roads on my regular commute (thankfully no longer).
Back in the day when I first started work, a car was out of the question so I commuted on a “rat bike” (a decrepit Honda 90 cub or similar) and had a decent bike for the good weather.
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It’s not really new tech or anything. It’s just a lump of lead & an earthing strap. I’m not sure it would work on a car in the same way it does on a hull due to the large number of exposed metal parts.
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I’m not sure a lump of lead and an earthing strap is consistent with Mazda’s gram strategy🤭
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I use one of these if I get caught on salty roads, but my ND has been in garage since they started salting the roads.
That said, garaging your car is supposed to be bad too, though I presume less bad than salt. I walked into my garage on one occasion and found condensation all over the body 
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I have used one of these for years (slightly different model) from Karcher. Really shifts accumulated road dirt and salt from wheel arches, and other difficult to get at areas underneath a vehicle. Especially useful for cleaning the top of shock absorbers and springs where mud and salt accumulates .
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I have something a bit like that too. The underbody sprays on wheels seem good for just that - easily wheeling under the body and sills