I'll relate my shovel experience from trying to dig out my dakota out of snow in a pasture several times last winter.

1. I had a gerber e-tool and I hated it. It is too short to move any large quantities of snow. Plus the spade configuration isn't a perfect 90 degrees. It's designed to be an excellent hoe, but it makes it incredibly hard to use if you want to dig snow out from under your vehicle.

2. Normally I wound up using a run of the mill aluminum scoop shovel to dig myself out. These worked pretty good if you had to clear snow in front of you or if the snow was soft. It would still work in hard snow, but it took a lot of effort. Also the size can make it hard to dig out the underside of my truck.

3. One shovel I had along a few times would be a square headed steel shovel. It can't move a lot of snow, but it worked great on hard snow and for clearing the underside of the truck.

Ideally I'd want a fullsize version of a aluminum scoop shovel and a steel shovel since that an tackle most instances. The little folding shovels can do somethings, but I realized that I wouldn't necessarily want to rely on just one of those since they can't clear much snow. Of course just about everytime I got stuck, it was so bad that I was having to clear snow out from the entire underside of the truck(usually I was falling through hard snowpack), so a big shovel was a necessity.