Why are cars made to be able to steer the front wheels instead of the wheels at the back?
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Go to Lowe’s/HD and watch people try to steer the flat carts that steer at the back. You don’t want them. We only use vehicles that street at the back door tight spaces like fork lifts.
Ever push a shopping cart from the wrong end? That’s basically rear wheel steering. Turns out that you get a lot of undesirable behavior when steering from the rear. Front steering wants to straighten out of a turn, but rear steering tends to result in oversteer and fishtailing. When braking, the vehicle’s weight is more on the front wheels, so with front steering you retain control. And more simply, the driver sits at the front of the vehicle, so it’s mechanically simpler to connect to the steering wheel.
Physics and shit. Have you ever tried to back a car at speed and for long distances? The small vector corrections that you make when traveling forwards are minimal, while–if made with the rear wheels–they would be amplified and wreak havoc on society.
2 biggest reasons are how sketchy anything rear steering is at any decent rate of speed, test this in an empty parking lot some night if your car will do more than 20 in reverse, and the fact when you rear steer the back end goes the opposite way when you begin to turn meaning if you turn at a stop light and someone is beside you, you will hit them
You would see countless people rolling their vehicles. Steering from the back allows for too much turning radius for a very fast moving vehicle that is primarily designed to go relatively strait, most of the time.
Steering the front wheels gives you a much greater degree of control and is in general less squirrely. Think of it this way. If you steer the back wheels it’s like you are steering where the car has been where with the front you are steering closer to where are you going. It is worth mentioning that very few cars are equipped with 4 wheel steering systems such as the hicas systems on some older Nissan sports cars.
Go into an empty parking lot. Put your car in drive, and accelerate to 25 miles per hour. Now turn the wheel. What happens? Your car turns in the direction you turned the wheel. No problem.
Now put your car in reverse, and accelerate to 25 miles per hour. Turn the wheel. What happens? Your whole car spins around to where you’re facing the direction of travel again.
Front wheel steering is inherently stable, and rear wheel steering is inherently unstable. If you were in a rear steer vehicle on the highway and tried to change lanes, you would likely just do a J-turn and swap ends.
Historically, because the first car was more or less a horse-less horse carriage. And those had the front wheel steered because the horse pulled it.
Later it was actually tried but if the car is fast then it’s not good because it makes the car behave like a flag. A car called Dymaxion was done with rear steering, but it was a huge failure.
Forklifts however, do have rear wheel steering because it’s much better to precisely aim with the fork.
Try moving a defective shopping cart where you can’t steer the front wheel.
Pain in the butt.
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