Front Wheel Drive vs Rear Wheel Drive?

Why do such serious automakers as Mercedes, Jaguar, Porsche, BMW still produce cars not with front drive but with rear drive?
There are Mercedes with front wheel drive such as its “A” class, but this is unusual for their smaller car lines like their golf-class or even smaller.

Negatives of Front Wheel Drive

1) Vibration from the power pack and gear box pass to the body, this is a specific feature of the construction.
2) At speeding in some conditions jet moments pass to the rudder.
3) At immediate start mass passes to back but leading wheels skid more.

What Wheel Drive is Better?

Any car engineer will answer you something like this: With the rear wheel drive car turning front wheels make effect of stopping and back wheels — surplus power. So, rear wheel driven cars are not susceptible to sliding in turns as easily as front wheeled vehicles. It is called oversteering. As for front wheel drive cars, which are labeled as understeering.

“I could buy BMW or Mercedes but I drive in winter and I need the front wheel, so I have to buy Audi,” as one of my friend said.

And it is not only his opinion. Many drivers feel more assured if they are driving front wheel cars in winter. And it is difficult to not to agree with my friend’s statement above. When driving on different types of surfaces or weather conditions, cars with different wheel drive behave in different ways.

Let’s begin with asphalt. I’m absolutely sure that a common driver will never notice the difference between cars with front wheel drive or rear wheel drive when he drives on asphalt road. This difference appears when turnings.

And here experience taken from racing cars helps. It allows coming to the following conclusion, unexpected for many readers: back wheel drive is better on asphalt.

Evidences? If it was vice versa, bolides of Formula 1 would have front wheel drive, back wheel drive cars’ victory would be considered accidental. But today it is a norm.

Rear wheel drive car is easy to control. This can not be said about front wheel drive cars. Maybe they should be driven in different ways. Neither yes nor no. The main difference of front wheel drive car is the following: front tires do almost all of the work – control, speeding and the main part in braking. It is easy to overload them. As a result – tires have burnt up or worn out quickly and in some cases these cars can experience clutch problems. and lost their clutch features.

Drivers of front wheel drive car need to push the accelerator pedal very carefully when coming out of a turn. Immediate accelerating leads to mis-allocation of car weight, to the front part of the car loading, which causes the following: the back part becomes lighter and it leads to insufficient car turning, let alone messing up your gas mileage.

As a result, car is taken aside. Let’s see what racer does when he drivers front wheel drive car at high speed. He uses braking pedal with the left foot and pushes it a little coming to turning. In the middle of long turn an experienced racer throws accelerator pedal for the moment to course load allocation. It will reduce insufficient car maneuverability, and after this the car’s front tires will work better.

A racer on rear wheel drive car can try to do the same, but sudden adding an accelerator pedal in the middle of steep turn causes wheels’ skidding as car turns around its axis. The car turns and at the same time begins speeding. If you do this with front wheel drive car it will be thrown out the line. A racer, driving front wheel drive car, should try to straighten the car before going out turn as quick as possible.

But let’s back to a common driver. Drivers of front wheel drive car feel more confident on slippery winter roads; this is because of your front wheeled drive’s excellent road stability. When the way is straight and when speeding up, front wheel drive car slides less than rear wheel drive car. It is absolutely clear, that it is better to pull then to push. The front wheels pull the car after themselves, and you will never have such results with rare ones.