Travelling here in winter can be quite dangerous. Just this winter I left my car on a turn off on the main road from Keflavik to Reykjavik picking up my parents from the airport because there was an insanely icy section. The rear tyres were at the end of their life and it just wasn’t safe to drive. We got picked up by my father in law and drove passed five separate crashes in the space of 1km. I rolled a Nissan Patrol off the side of route one exiting Reykjavik towards the south hitting a patch of ice with good, studded tyres on, narrowly missing traffic going both ways. Driving back from a weekend away, my wife and I were driving to the back route up onto the same mountain pass. It’d been very sunny so the south facing road was clear of snow and we narrowly avoided getting hit by a driver coming down it who hadn’t noticed the snow drift on the road and was coming way too fast. They shot off into a field and after an extremely bumpy few seconds managed to steer back. And that’s just the highlights of the last ten years. I ski tour quite a bit so travel often in the winter and have seen unending stupidity and dumb decision making that wasn’t quite as terrifying. In particular common tourist routes like the Golden Circle can become impassable or dangerous to attempt if you don’t have a proper vehicle.
The trick is choosing when to travel and as a tourist you’re often uniquely compelled to try to drive in dangerous conditions. Coming here in winter is very much an exercise in adjusting plans to the conditions, taking note of the road condition information and driving very carefully.