On Sat, 01 Jul 2017 13:07:12 +0100, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:

In article ,
Steve Walker wrote:
Funny how almost every road car is FWD. RWD is for doing silly
stunts. FWD is easier to control.

Road cars are mainly FWD for two reasons as far as I know.

Think you need to make that 'small to medium sized' road cars.

1) The transverse engine and gearbox, plus lack of a propshaft allows
for a far smaller tunnel and hence more cabin space in the same size car.

Yes. Although with modern crash protection the packaging advantage isn't
as marked.

The most annoying crash protection feature is the rounded bonnet (to flip pedestrians up instead of smashing them). What this means is you can't see the front end of your car - so when trying to pull out of a junction, you often see people a metre further back than they need to be.

2) FWD tends to retain grip when a RWD car might have let go.

Entirely depends. Most of the weight over the front wheels does not give
best grip to all wheels. It may give better traction under some
circumstances.

The engine is heavy, it's over the front wheels. More grip on FWD cars.

The flip side to the latter is that once either has let go, the RWD car
is more controllable - they can be steered on the throttle - but only
people experienced in doing that (not me) are likely to get that right.

With clever suspension design you can make the handling much as you want
under normal driving.

So why don't they all do that?

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