> Rear-Wheel-Drive Cars Are Back
That said tere are still manufacturers, like BMW, producing 50% of their as rear-wheel drive (and 33% as AWD).
Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
41–50 of 176 posts
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#42One of the big negatives to sportiness in FWD cars has always been torque steer. But that is due to unequal-length driveshafts, not strictly the FWD-ness. A FWD EV shouldn't suffer from torque steer. I do welcome RWD EVs, but let's not get carried away. Honda has demonstrated again and again that FWD vehicles are capable of very high track performance.
They have been selling FWD cars for years with equal length shafts. It helps, but does not solve the problem. The newer, fancy suspension setups like the Civic Type R (mentioned in reply to you) get rid of most of the torque steer, but it's still there. If anything, all the extra bottom end torque from an electric motor is going to cause worse torque steer. The problem will not be solved by electric motors alone.
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you lose traction in the front, you lose all control of the vehicle. With RWD, you rarely lose traction on all 4 tires, so you always have at least one working control. You've still got one control working in the rear: brakes. The understeer characteristics of a FWD car are very easy and intuitive to recover from. If someone can't manage traction in an FWD understeer condition, they almost certainly lack the ski…
> The understeer characteristics of a FWD car are very easy and intuitive to recover This might be true when discussing snap over-steer and throttle induced under-steer on a track but is a complete lie for snow driving where most drivers will just keep steering harder in response to under-steer which is not productive and you don't have enough traction for lifting and braking to induce much extra weight on the front.
> most drivers will just keep steering harder in response to under-steer
That's my point. Make the wrong correction in RWD car and you end up oversteering beyond 90 degrees in an unrecoverable spin. The failure modes of FWD understeer in the snow are all recoverable.
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#44I think this is just a side effect of most of the current EV offerings being expensive premium products. Once cheap EVs become more common, FWD will return because having the motor in front allows for much more efficient energy recapture with regen braking.
How does FWD vs RWD matter for energy recapture in regen breaking? As long as you're not losing traction on your rear wheels during breaking, there's no difference in terms of energy captured in FWD vs RWD.
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#45I think this is just a side effect of most of the current EV offerings being expensive premium products. Once cheap EVs become more common, FWD will return because having the motor in front allows for much more efficient energy recapture with regen braking.
How does FWD vs RWD matter for energy recapture in regen breaking? As long as you're not losing traction on your rear wheels during breaking, there's no difference in terms of energy captured in FWD vs RWD.
The front brakes do most of the work. It is not the case, as you assume, that both front and rear contribute equally to braking. If you didn't use the front brakes, or even if you tried to have them apply the same force, the rear wheels would absolutely skid.
If you want an extreme visual example, check out stunt cyclists who brake so hard the rear wheel comes off the ground. Pretty easy to see that the rear wheel isn't contributing to braking when it's in the air.
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
As somebody who learned to drive in snow in a RWD vehicle, I think FWD is frankly ridiculous in slippery conditions. If you lose traction in the front, you lose all control of the vehicle. With RWD, you rarely lose traction on all 4 tires, so you always have at least one working control. I've never really gotten the hang of driving FWD in snow, and greatly prefer RWD. The trick, in my experience, is to learn how to g…
It's easy. You point the front wheels in the direction you want to go, and accelerate. The front wheels will dig the snow and also throw it off the wheels if you spin them really hard so clean tires can bite better on the snow.
If you have too much forward momentum though, smashing the gas to get both wheels spinning kinda results in you just continuing to go straight.
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#47I think this is just a side effect of most of the current EV offerings being expensive premium products. Once cheap EVs become more common, FWD will return because having the motor in front allows for much more efficient energy recapture with regen braking.
How does FWD vs RWD matter for energy recapture in regen breaking? As long as you're not losing traction on your rear wheels during breaking, there's no difference in terms of energy captured in FWD vs RWD.
"As long as you're not losing traction on your rear wheels" is the key part.
The more you brake, the more weight shifts forward, which results in less traction available to use to recapture.
People vastly overestimate how much traction is available at the rear during braking, and running out of traction at the rear typically results in the car spinning (especially in an EV with low rotational inertia with most of the weight between the axles) so regen tends to be very conservatively tuned to not cause rear lock up, thus using even less of the little traction available.
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snow tires don't hold a candle to the doubling(!) of contact patch over which torque is transmitted that you get going from FWD/RWD to AWD and no amount of low effort quips about steering and braking will change the fact that, among people who drive like adults, the ability to get up hills, cross snow banks where cross streets meet plowed main roads and get up to speed for a merge without anything dumb happening are…
> Snow tires don't hold a candle to... Yeah. They do. I've driven pretty much every combination of FWD, RWD, 4WD, and AWD, with and without snow tires, in a variety of winter conditions. The "other tires" were regular all seasons, not high performance summer tires or anything. RWD with all seasons is really bad in snow, and mine generally didn't leave the parking lot in winter, because it simply couldn't. When you ca…
I have a FWD and AWD variant of the same car in my driveway and call bullshit.
Why is it so hard to believe that a product that advertises 30-50% improvement in traction results in a lesser improvement than doubling the area over which tractive force is applied?
I used to drink the snow tire kool-aid until I bought a set for the FWD car of and realized that better straight line stopping distance and cornering ability don't actually help you because being able to controllably put power to the ground is still the bottleneck in the "is it reasonable to drive in these conditions" equation by a mile and while they help they are nowhere near a replacement for doubling the contact patch that force goes through.
Sure, they get me a little bit of margin to be an idiot and come into turns too hot or stop short but I wasn't really doing that stuff in the snow anyway so the benefit is lost on me (and people adapt their driving style to the performance they have available so how big is the benefit really?) and they still don't make the FWD car climb my damn street like the AWD car does so I don't buy them anymore. I keep chains in the trunk for the really bad days.
The FWD/RWD nit picking is mostly irrelevant IMO because any fundamental difference is far less than the vehicle to vehicle difference within or outside a given category. Better handling in the dry more or less directly leads to better handling of the same type in the snow. A RWD box truck will out hill climb a FWD minivan but the latter will out corner the former and a Miata and hot FWD hatch will be better than both at everything.
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does FWD vs RWD matter for energy recapture in regen breaking? As long as you're not losing traction on your rear wheels during breaking, there's no difference in terms of energy captured in FWD vs RWD.
The front brakes do most of the work. It is not the case, as you assume, that both front and rear contribute equally to braking. If you didn't use the front brakes, or even if you tried to have them apply the same force, the rear wheels would absolutely skid. If you want an extreme visual example, check out stunt cyclists who brake so hard the rear wheel comes off the ground. Pretty easy to see that the rear wheel is…
In cars that only have rear motors, unless you apply the brakes (or they have some blended braking setup) then ALL regen is via the rear motor.
Obviously, front brakes are capable of more braking, but the limit at the end of the day is the regen of the battery itself and how much the inverter can handle regen. RWD-only EVs are already capable of ~75kW of regen. Moving to FWD to try to gain regen is only marginally going to give you better efficiency, if anything. It only matters for harder braking.
Re: Rear-wheel-drive cars are back and we have EVs to thank
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The understeer characteristics of a FWD car are very easy and intuitive to recover This might be true when discussing snap over-steer and throttle induced under-steer on a track but is a complete lie for snow driving where most drivers will just keep steering harder in response to under-steer which is not productive and you don't have enough traction for lifting and braking to induce much extra weight on the front.
> most drivers will just keep steering harder in response to under-steer That's my point. Make the wrong correction in RWD car and you end up oversteering beyond 90 degrees in an unrecoverable spin. The failure modes of FWD understeer in the snow are all recoverable.
>That's my point. Make the wrong correction in RWD car and you end up oversteering beyond 90 degrees in an unrecoverable spin. The failure modes of FWD understeer in the snow are all recoverable.
You're making one of those textbook correct but reality wrong statements that clipboard warriors love.
Sure, you can recover from under-steer but if you're already doing the wrong thing and pointing the wheel where you want the car to go you almost certainly won't.
With over-steer if you do the "natural" thing and steer the wheels toward where you want the car to point at least you have a chance. Sure many people might flub it but that's a heck of a lot better than the "no chance" you get if you react the same way to under-steer. Also, if you do over-correct the over-correction may very well not be as severe as the initial over-steer giving you a better chance to get it right the second time.
Sure, under-steer is theoretically recoverable and with over-steer you can theoretically spin or slide backwards but in reality in "on the street" situations (i.e. not what you see someone doing on an old taxiway in a training video) 99.9% of the time you'll have hit something long before either happens.
Edit: Since I'm apparently so wrong anyone care to explain? Or is it just "sideways bad because smart man with vest and clipboard say so".