Driving from Kyoto to Shirakawa-go

Hi, myself and my wife are planning to drive from Kyoto to Shirakawa in late November 2018. I have read a lot of disadvantages with self driving. But we love to drive, so we are wondering if there are nice look-out points along the way to take photos? We will be staying one night in Hida, is it enough to allow 5 hours of driving time each way to Shirakawa, starting from Kyoto? Also would there be snow already in late November?

I think there are a lot of advantages of self-drive; for the first few visits to Japan a JR Rail Pass is perfect, but there will come a time that you get into the countryside and the JR services are getting to a few trains a day, for this and for locations away from a town with a station self-drive is perfect IMO.
For your trip, you have the option to drive through the mountains and back along the Sea of Japan or vv.

I found the drive-times predicted by Google Maps to be accurate enough, but weirdly enough, the driving-times estimated by the GPS in the car to be way off. The worst was the Mazda I rented last, it would almost estimate double the time needed and keep updating the estimate as we were driving along. Never figured out why :-)

Last season there was snow in early November and without snow tyres or chains, cars were not allowed to continue on some of the roads in the area. If you have some experience driving in snow, that is definately a plus.

Thank you both for the feedback. I have read a lot about JR pass, but because we both are not planning to travel between cities that much, I am not sure if a JR pass is worthwhile to get. We will be arriving to Osaka and spend 5 days in this city, have not planned to do anything yet but to shop and eat, hoping on/off trains occasionally, we don't know if this required a JR pass or should we just buy tickets as we go, any tips? then we will travel to Kyoto and spend 3 days there. Then hire a car and drive to Shirakawa for 2 days. Then return the car to Kyoto and hop on the train to Osaka and spend 5 days there. As you can see, we both will just be walking around shops and eat and relax. Any recommendations?