I know nothing about cars, and I hear this often without any explanation.
In: Technology
I live in New England, our winters aren’t the worst in the world but we have our days.
It’s really common for folks out here to get AWD cars and assume they’re invincible. They think it means they don’t need snow tires and they’ll pass you doing 85 during a blizzard.
Folks, we ALL have all wheel brakes. I’m confident that my modern fwd car with good snow tires is safer than your Subaru for 95% of things most folks do.
Imagine you’ve fallen on an icy surface and are on your stomach. You can’t stand up so you’re stuck crawling back out.
Front wheel drive is like crawling with your arms. You can pull yourself and change the angle where you’re pulling. Though you still slide, you can at least have some turn control.
Rear wheel drive is like pushing with both legs. You can only push forward and use your arms to steer. However, your arms are sliding on the ice so it’s much harder to control where you’re turning.
the basic idea of it – front wheel drive “pulls” the car. Rear wheel drive “pushes” the car.
Because the front wheels are pulling the car, you (and your steering) will have better control in slippery or snowy conditions. Note that it’s not perfect control as if it was a dry and sunny day, just that you have better general control.
Rear wheel drive is pushing from the back, which means if your front wheels hit a patch of ice/snow and change the car’s direction, your rear wheels will push you in that new direction. It’s something you can still learn to deal with and prepare for, but the general idea is that you have less control in a rear wheel drive in slippery/snowy conditions.
Front wheel drive cars get better traction in snow because the engine and transmission sit directly above the drive wheels. That extra weight helps create more friction and traction as opposed to having the power train in front and the drive wheels in the rear.
Also, from a handling standpoint, since front wheel drive cars essentially pull themselves along, they’re less prone to fishtailing and sliding around.They’re just generally more stable under most circumstances.
Most cars have their engine in the front if the car, which makes the front heavy. If you have front wheel drive, the front wheels get more traction due to the weight if the engine.
Two main features:
The first is that a front engine, front wheel drive vehicle had the majority of the weight centred over the front axle – this means the front wheels will have the most traction.
With a rear wheel drive vehicle the rear (drive) wheels have much less weight centred over them and less grip.
The second is that the front wheels both providing drive and steering allows the driver to pull the car in any direction – whichever way the driver has the wheels pointed, even with poor traction the car will travel in that direction.
With a rear wheel drive car the drive wheels don’t steer, so will always push the car forwards. This is normally fine, as the front wheels will have traction and steer the car, however in snow and lower grip situations, if the front wheels don’t have great traction the car will massively understeer as the drive wheels push forward, and the front wheels just slide rather than steering the car.
Rear wheel drive can have performance benefits in good conditions however, as when the steering wheels do have traction they will steer properly, and will avoid having issues with the torque of the engine and power distribution interfering with the grip and steering.
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