Rear wheel drive.

This morning I happened to click on the weather channel.I almost never click on that channel.That guy said, If your car is rear wheel drive, stay home! cuhulin

Reply to
cuhulin
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snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net wrote in news:6076-4D2B8861-617@storefull-

3172.bay.webtv.net:

No way. RWD is way more fun that FWD on snowy roads. Just remember to take a case of beer to help pass the time once you land in the ditch.

Reply to
Tegger

So much misinformation out there. best snow car I ever had was my Porsche 944 with Dunlop Winter Sports. Now that may not be the best car overall in snow but tires make more difference than what end's wheels are driven; and given decent weight dist and high polar moment I'd prefer RWD thanks.

nate

Reply to
Nate Nagel

A Corvair with winter tires will just keep going. Around the wrecked super duper automatic this and electronic that.

Reply to
AMuzi

I agree! I used do 360's in intersections.

Reply to
Paul in Houston TX

Nate Nagel wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@roosters.net:

Not when you're having fun doing donuts and let it get away from you. Thats when you learn there is such a thing as too-much fun.

Yeah, but you can't do donuts or slide the ass-end out in a FWD car, which is what I meant in my original reply.

Me too.

Reply to
Tegger

Like nate wrote, tires, tires and TIRES.

Give me an empty road, RWD, and proper snow tires and I love driving in the snow.

Reply to
Brent

A Snowmobile. cuhulin

Reply to
cuhulin

Yeah the Corvair is great in the snow but the heater sucks unless you have a gas heater. :)

Reply to
m6onz5a

25+ years ago, we had a pretty bad ice storm in a small town where I lived. (Less than 600 people) At that time, there was a young, large woman (okay, she was a fat chick. sorry) who drive a Chevette. A half dozen of us guys riding in my car never laughed so hard when she would intentionally spin doughnuts at this one intersection by cranking the steering wheel and hitting the emergency brake, repeatedly. Every guy in our car had sore torso muscles the next day from laughing so hard. I don't make fun of people, obese people included, but there was something about a Chevette with a women driver who seemingly took up every inch of usable interior space doing doughnuts through a deserted intersection that seemed amusing. Of course, a bunch of beer in our system probably didn't make matters any better.
Reply to
Kruse

m6> Yeah the Corvair is great in the snow but the heater sucks unless you

I do have the 'instant heat and lots of it' units installed.

Nice in the cold, but more importantly your engine runs much cooler on hot days or at speed without all the lower baffles.

Reply to
AMuzi

There is, or used to be available accesory gas heaters for aircooled VWs.

On paydays, people doing donuts in the parking lots, getting out of Dodge. cuhulin

Reply to
cuhulin

Best one I ever had was a '72 Toyota Corona with plain old standard (non snow) Bias Ply tires on it. Thing was a tank.

Oh, and RWD, too.

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

Sure you can! As long as you don't have a SAAB with the e brake on the front wheels (Actually, you CAN, but it ain't easy)

Just get up some steam, turn the wheel, hit the e brake until you start the spin, let off and hit the gas! Simple!

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

There's a reason Subaru named the 360 the 360...

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B wrote in news:hJSWo.31016$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe16.iad:

Now, in your FWD car, do this for minutes on end, without pausing unless you stall the engine or end up in the ditch...

Reply to
Tegger

Oh, that's much different. Never mind...

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

In my observation, FWD has a traction advantage as long as you:

1) go in a straight line 2) start off slowly 3) don't abruptly change speed 4) don't encounter changes in traction (like, traversing ruts in the snow)

In my observation, FWD loses the advantage as soon as:

A) you turn the wheel while moving - Toe-out on turns makes the wheels fight each other. In slippery conditions this means breaking traction. Also, a wheel only has so much "traction". Instead of using 100% traction for one purpose (driving or turning) you're splitting it between the two. Something's going to give. It doesn't mean understeer every time, but it makes it more likely. This is further compounded by combining the driving axle, steering axle and most effective braking axle.

B) take off too hard and shift the weight to the rear axle. Not exactly game over, but this is why you see people at stoplights spinning their wheels so much. They seem to think that more gas will make them go faster, when the opposite is true.

C) fail to match wheel speed to road speed, which is something that takes skill, and even skilled drivers have minimal feedback to tell how well they are doing. This means you may need to accelerate down a snowy hill with a curve in it. In RWD you can let the foot off the gas, and your rear tires may slide a little, but they'll also slow you down. Any oversteer you get out of it will likely be slow and easily correctable. This will be very different if engine braking breaks traction on your steering wheels.

D) have the road surface change under one drive wheel only- this can cause torque steer, disrupt your momentum or even yank the wheel out of your hands. If you are also turning, you could have sudden and violent shifts between understeer and oversteer. Probably not complete doom and gloom at 25mph, but for the paranoid drivers that freak out at the smallest thing, this could mean them going up on the sidewalk and ruining a pedestrian's day.

But I'm not an engineer. I could be smoking goodyear freckles in a water bong filled with burnt Type F.

-J

Reply to
phaeton

It snows a fair amount here (Syracuse), though not as much as people claim. I've been driving 40 years. (That may just mean I'm old.) At least for the conditions here (and driving Cavaliers with not-so-great tires, memory impairment, etc), I feel like I've had much more trouble with FWD. If the road is greasy with salt & slush, and there's much of a crown, FWD seems prone to pulling down the crown.

And, going around a corner on that grease, if the front loses traction, you're SOL. With RWD (and bigger cars, I suppose), the front was relatively lighter, and it seems like I could corner better, using steering plus varying power to the back.

YMMV.

Reply to
George

You're not too far off, and mentioned a lot of mistakes all the Marios make in the first snow storm.

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

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