RWD vs FWD...

Which is faster around turns? I've been having a debate and to me the fact stands Rwd is faster.

Mods figured this would be the best spot to attract attention and still relate to topic...
elk is right about the sport compact car comparo... the original thread quesion was about handling, not which drivetrain makes faster lap times....the type R has significantly more power, common sense would lead you to belive that it would obviously run a quicker lap

some one also said something about FF's being better on the auto/x course......??????....huh?

I was hoping you would jump in this Curtis :)
I no longer believe conumers set the trends, to much consumer behaviour is no controlled by marketing I think the power is now with the manufactor.


Well, you're right they did fleece us into buying SUVs and FWD :screwy:

I think the minority here is the true enthusiast. The college freshman who buys a cavalier does so because he/she was told that it was a safe, reliable, sporty, performance compact. Would it really sell if they said, "we settled for FWD for space and cost concerns, the chassis stiffness is the lowest frequency of any car currently in production, it only recieved two stars on frontal crash rating, the engine is a 20-year-old design that blows head gaskets, and you'll have to replace front tires every year since our cheap front suspension design chews tires under deflection from spring rates that are too soft"

The true enthusiast sees the Cavalier for what it is. A tin box with an engine that provides cheap transportation to and from the warranty repairs. But, the majority of the people don't know a thing about cars, and therefore have no choice but to take someone else's opinion on the topic; namely, the salesperson. They see that a Cavalier is $3000 less than a Corrola and just assume they are equal cars in their engineering and choose the less expensive option. In that spirit, the buyer of the Cavalier thinks their car is the greatest thing. They'll defend it in the face of BMW or Mercedes. This is the problem to which I alluded in a thread ages ago about import haters... Its not that I hate a certain thing, be it imports, FWD, a certain brand; its that I hate the blind subjectivism that people ascribe to their cars just because they own one. Be objective. In the absence of the knowledge you lack, don't just blindly say that your car is the best just because its your car. I'm not suggesting that everyone here is doing that, but I am seeing some. We have an opportunity here SINCE WE ARE A COLLECTION of enthusiasts from WITHIN THE MINORITY to be objective and really open some good discussions on this (and other) topics.

I currently own one FWD car. I have owned five in my life. They all provided cheap transportation in a bare-minimum flimsy unibody shell. I've also owned tons of full-frame RWD cars. They provide me with a look or utility that I want. Since I'm pretty savvy around cars I don't mind the fact that they have reliability issues, especially since I can usually fix whatever is wrong in 5 minutes with a spanner wrench and a beer. But above all, I know cars, I am objective about cars and their engineering, and I choose that which fits the situation.

Just let's all start being objective. FWD has its place and so does RWD. The very question of "which is better" is flawed. Its like asking, "which is better, PC or Mac?" The answer is... they have their strong points each, but what must be asked is; "for what purpose?" Vidoe and audio editing, I'd pick Mac. Web surfing and general utilities, I'd pick PC. But if you are just doing Email, it makes no difference. I think the majority of people (the ones who don't know much about cars) fall into that last category. They memorize how to retrieve their email, so it doesn't matter what computer they use. Drivers like my wife (she admits this freely) are the kind that put the key in, let the clutch out, and they've memorized the steps to make a car do what they want.

Let's also get this silly "push vs. pull" argument out of the way. There is absolutely no relevance to pushing or pulling that can even be vaguely associated with this argument. The complexities of Calculus as they apply to vehicle dynamics are so vast that "push" and "pull" don't even really exist as you think of them. I agree from a common sense standpoint that it seems like pull and push make sense, but once you understand how to calculate anti-dive geometry and can understand how it makes a car react with relation to the rear axle's roll center axis, you'll see just how silly those two words are in relation to vehicle dynamics.

Just as a sidenote: The world-standard in vehicle performance dynamics is Milliken's Race Car Vehicle Dynamics. Its an 800+ page engineering textbook that goes as far as describing tire compounds to the molecular level and how they provide friction to the road. Ya know how many pages it spends on FWD as a performance entity? One. They use one paragraph to basically say that its so difficult to engineer anything even vaguely resembling the potential of RWD, that they won't even cover it. The forces you place on RWD are exactly opposite and counterintuitive to many of the velocities you try to achieve. The result is that you have to engineer a FWD suspension in "backwards" ways to get it to do what you want. In the process you have created an undesirable geometry elsewhere. Again, that is not to say that it can't be used as a performance entity, I just would never choose to start from a handicapped platform. It doesn't make sense to me.

For instance a good way to get more traction in the front-drive application is to reverse the anti-dive geometry so that it loads the front suspension during a launch... but not only does that mess with caster curves, by loading the front axle, you shift more weight to the back during acceleration. A case where the very process by which you gain traction, shifts weight to the wrong axle. With RWD, you just design your rear axle to load, and the accleration shifts more weight on its own. A place where both work in harmony. The other issue with race suspensions on a FWD application, you have to compensate for things like steering geometry in rather odd ways sometimes, the very method by which you make acceptable road manners destroys toe, camber change in steering, and ackerman angles. No free rides. Its tough enough designing a front suspension that will make the desired result when there is no power there, but making a front suspension with all of the requirements of camber curve, caster curve, roll center, instant center, anti-dive, and weight transfer is tough enough. Adding traction from drive wheels is just adding another impossible thing into the mix.

For this reason, almost all FWD vehicles are of an LCA-strut design. The trade-offs are phenomenal. Acceleration traction is minimized, torque steer is evident, and handling is made acceptable enough for highway use, but otherwise its a very unimaginative design for FWD cars. Further evidence that it was a financial move and not a performance one. A true UCA/LCA double arm suspension would be ultimately tunable, but they won't do it. Its expensive to design, takes up too much room in a FWD application, and the average driver won't appreciate it. Why do it if people like my wife are buying their cars? She couldn't care less about camber curves and anti-dive.

For that reason, the minority like us buy cars that meet our performance expectations. In most cases, FWD can be engineered with enough performance to satisfy most street-goers, but many hold out for RWD.

I had to skip over the last 2 pages since I'm about to eat dinner, but I'd like to add one thing:

You DON'T look cool smoking the front tires :loser:

so when you are publishing this curtis?? haha jk..very informative indeed..

I just did... I clicked on "post reply" That's as close as I get to publishing :D

Nicely written Curtis, but I think Lotus and Honda would have to disagree with coments about FWD and performance. They have both made some very succesfull FWD Performance cars.
Renult, VW and Nissan might also want to have a few words to add, along with Toyota, SAAB, Crysler and most modern manufactors.


FWD clearly has its problems, but I am off the opinion that every problem has a solution.

haha curt you have the funniest sig.

whilst we're on the subject of UCA and LCA, true double arm suspensions in fwd cars.
don't the alfa 156 and peugeot 406 (and now 407) have them?

Beats me. I've not had any direct experience with them.

Nicely written Curtis, but I think Lotus and Honda would have to disagree with coments about FWD and performance. They have both made some very succesfull FWD Performance cars.
Renult, VW and Nissan might also want to have a few words to add, along with Toyota, SAAB, Crysler and most modern manufactors.
Lotus’s Honda’s Nissan’s Toyota’s Renault’s and Chrysler’s top performers are all RWD. The reason they make FWD performance cars is so they can make the cars hi-profit by basing them on there mainstream cars, not because there performance is just as good as RWD cars. And the reason they have been successful is lack of competition. Most auto manufactures gave up on there under $30,000 RWD cars because the under $30,000 performance car market is small and designing a RWD chassis for it would be low profit. If you look at the over $30,000 car market there are lots of RWD cars.

Volkswagen and Saab just don’t have any real performance cars, even compared to other FWD cars.

Hear are some videos of the RWD Renault Clio V6, for no reason then I thought someone might like to see them.
http://www.renaultsport.co.uk/roadcars/cliov6/videos.htm

Though there is the problem with MR of losing all luggage space, much like you do with an MR2.

The 2nd generation MR2s have a fairly healthy sized rear trunk, a smallish front trunk and small storage compartments behind each seat.

I would hardly say that is losing "all" luggage space.
My MR2s have allowed me to do plenty of traveling :)

... the 1st Gen MR2s have a little less storage and the 3rd gen Spyders do have zero storage.

i'd go with RWD, because would you rather push or pull something. Imagine a heavy shopping cart, would you pull it from the front, or push it from the rear. Virtually all of the best cars in the world are RWD. FWD really just gives you better luggage, and fuel economy. Performance-wise seeing how RWD cars are faster than FWD cars almost anywhere, I'd say RWD is better. Also some of the cars with the best handling are all RWD. F1 cars, LeMans Cars, Porsche, etc

I hope I am not going to get bashed at for bringing this up for my lack of knowlage of physics or entering a consideration for a FWD car.

However a lot of people here talk about pavement, I would like to know which one on a dirt track or an off road course would do a RWD or FWD. Since i am from minnesota with very icy winters i thought i would lend a bad traction senario. If i remember my oldsmobile history (love old oldsmobiles) The Toronado was one of the first american front wheel drive cars. I remembering reading an article where it was competing on a hill clime with a bunch of rear wheel drive cars and the other drivers were laughing at it, well they weren't laughing at it when it was at the top first.

anyway

discuss

Andrew7dg
Watch the video: Video (http://www.dcxmediaservices.com/videoptrs/wms/dctv/Feb04/Fleet_Participant_Response_300k.wvx)

i'd go with RWD, because would you rather push or pull something. Imagine a heavy shopping cart, would you pull it from the front, or push it from the rear. Virtually all of the best cars in the world are RWD. FWD really just gives you better luggage, and fuel economy. Performance-wise seeing how RWD cars are faster than FWD cars almost anywhere, I'd say RWD is better. Also some of the cars with the best handling are all RWD. F1 cars, LeMans Cars, Porsche, etc



If you had bothered to read the thread before replying you would find that nearly all of your statements have been shown to be unfounded and largly false.

Yeah, but why read the thread? Why learn something new, when what you know is already right in your mind?

Why are people heaping MR and FR into the same basket? That's like saying a Daihatsu Charade and a Lexus SC430 are exactly the same because they are made by the Toyota Corporation.


They're very different, the only thing they have in common is that they both drive the back wheels, the similarities end there.

Andrew7dg
Watch the video: Video (http://www.dcxmediaservices.com/videoptrs/wms/dctv/Feb04/Fleet_Participant_Response_300k.wvx)


First you have to admit that was pretty bias of a video (like they were trying to sell you something like...mmm.. a CRYSLER!) Sorry I thought it was funny.

But ok we will go with it for now. I would like to say though for the crysler, a lot had to do with the computer control of the car and how much weight is in the back. Like most of this discussion it comes down to engineering of the car. How did the car manufactures design the car to be front wheel drive or rear wheel. For example the Honda civic HB would not benifit from having rwd in the winter since the back end weighs like nothing. I would like to point out too that not every car with rwd does well in the winter. Example old ford thunderbirds HORRID!!!

So in the case when they were racing up the hill though with the olds toronado I was wondering if it was to its advantage by having fwd given the time period and technology of the cars.

so unlike the people in the video i am not completely bought on the idea that RWD are the only way to go

Sorry correction

RWD are the only way to go in the winter or off roading conditions

I just didn't want all the RWD people mad at me

id rather have all-wheel in the snow.

As has been mentioned, there really is no good comparison. The rest of the package that the FWD and RWD cars come in often make a bigger difference than whether a car has FWD or RWD. As Curtis mentioned, there are advantages that FWD has over RWD, just that none of them are performance related.

If you are going purely for performance, RWD is better than FWD for several reasons, some of which have been mentioned:

1. Better weight distribution potential
2. More space to allow a better suspension design and a wider wheel/tire package
3. While accelerating, the weight transfers to the drive wheels, allowing better traction and better acceleration
4. Better placement of weight for reducing the polar moment of inertia (this is the biggie of why MR is better than FR)
5. Higher cornering potential due to the work being spread out more evenly among the tires
6. No torque being transmitted through the steering column

There are more, but this is a brief overview. The more power there is, generally the more the advantage goes to RWD.

As far as why FWD cars do very well in the BTCC, ETCC, and every other touring car series out there is the RWD cars are penalized in the regulations for their use of RWD, either by weight or power restrictions compared to the FWD cars.