I beg to differ. As a member of the public of driving age back in the sixties, I loved Minis for the way they drove. They were actually a bit more expensive to run than other small cars of that era due to higher servicing costs, and high tyre wear rates.
Chris
They actually weren't much liked by the public at release. Took quite a time to become popular.
I'm absolutely confident that's not why my mum bought one.
The Mini actually came into production whilst such dinosaurs as the Ford Popular 103E was on sale (just!).
Chris
Indeed - and a female neighbour, who was in her '30s and a primary school teacher bought one new. I thought she was mad. Although it was quite a bit cheaper than a Mini.
People would go to the show rooms to laugh at the car with the funny little wheels.
"Dave Plowman (News)" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
Yes, Dave. That was kinda my point.
My father was in the trade and I remember him asking a pal who sold Morris what it was like pre-release. 'Dreadful little thing that will never catch on'.
You didn't make that clear, though. I'm sure Issigonis could have designed a superb handling RWD small car at that time too if he'd wanted or been allowed to - after all the Minor was streets ahead in that department in its day. And would have been even better if he'd been allowed the engine he wanted.
"Dave Plowman (News)" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
"RWD cars get the flash stuff, because RWD is currently a selling point, and RWD cars are positioned as premium products. NOT because RWD is somehow inherently more expensive. FWD cars get the cheap stuff, because FWD is inherently better packaged, so FWD cars are positioned as the value end of the market. NOT because FWD is somehow inherently cheap."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but ISTR it was originally supposed to have a lighter flat 4 Steyr engine? Would probably have improved the road holding, which IMO was already very good compared to the competition. Mike.
the twin engine version was the one to have, I reckon.
OK. I'll concede that for a novice driver, FWD is probably safer, but given the same degree of experience and competence, I don't think RWD is more unsafe tha FWD.
What I can also say is that after driving RWD cars almost exclusively for well over 40 years, the Audi 100 that I owned for about 3 months was the only car that had me really worried from a safety POV. Particularly in wet conditions. Within days of having it, I lost the front end completely on a wide lane roundabout in the wet. No steering. Luckily steering came back as the car slowed, and I just narrowly missed hitting the outside kerb. I should add that the roundabout was clear at the time, otherwise I wouldn't have entered it so fast. But no faster than I was used to taking it in my previous RWD cars in the wet without any problems. The roundabout was on a trip I made 2-3 times a month for years, so I was very familiar with it. For anyone interested it was Ashington roundabout on the A 29.
I've owned two Cortinas and a Consul which were notorious for oversteer, and found it easy to adapt to them. The rears did 'step out' occasionally, but not enough to worry me, once I knew their limits, and before you say it, I don't consider my car control abilities to be exceptional in any way. I'm just someone who is probably more familiar than most with RWD cars, but no better than anyone else with similar experience, who, shall we say, drives a little enthusiastically.
I'll leave you to have the last word if you want it. We're never going to agree, so as you say, there's little point in continuing the discussion. Mike. .
"Mike G" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:
S**te tyres on the front?
But I think you've just kinda proved the point there. As you slowed, it just came back into shape.
Is the back end stepping out on a RWD car as easy for "Joe Average" to catch? No.
Perhaps if you'd put some decent tyres on it as a first step.....It would then have gone round the corner as fast as the cars you were more familiar with. However at least it wasn't the back end you lost in a rwd car which would have more likely seen you hit the kerb and other scenery backwards rather than just come back into line by itself as it slowed - a fwd trait.
Nope. They both understeered like pigs but when you actually lost an end it was more likely to be the rear. Understeer and total grip at each end are not the same thing. Every normal standard road car is set up to understeer because average drivers find it much more reassuring, intuitive and easier to control.
If you, or anyone else reading this, wants to feel what oversteer actually feels like then pump up the front tyres on your car to bursting point and let plenty out of the rears. 40 psi front, 20 psi rear should do it on most cars whether fwd or rwd. A car that actually oversteers requires LESS steering input the faster you go into a corner. It's totally counter intuitive and very alarming if you've never tried it. Warning - you might well crash trying this so do it at your own risk. Try a known corner slowly and then gradually increase the speed. You'll find the car wants to leap up the kerb on left handers and cross the road on right handers. As you try and reduce steering input to stay on line the car gets unsettled and if you're not careful loses one end or the other in a way you're unlikely to recover from.
We are in fact so used to understeering cars that even a car that handles neutrally feels very odd to most drivers. A car that truly oversteers feels almost impossible to control. A race driver wants a neutral car which requires the same steering input all the time and maximises the grip of the tyres at both ends. An average road driver can't cope with even that.
I remember a day I spent at the track with a customer running in his race MGB I'd just built the engine for. I drove there in my Sierra, rwd but understeered like a pig like all road cars, and spent the day hurling around a car with race tuned suspension, solid bushes or ball joints instead of the mushy things we get on road cars and which responded to every tiny movement of the steering wheel with an immediate and precise reaction. I got used to it very quickly but when the day was over and I got back into my Sierra I actually very nearly crashed. I came to the first left hand corner on the country road the race track was down, made the tiny steering wheel input I'd become accustomed to during the day and sailed straight across the road onto the other side because the car A) didn't react for what felt like half an hour to the steering wheel and B) when it did it hardly changed direction. Luckily nothing was coming the other way and over the next few bends I relearned what it means to drive an average crap handling terminally understeering road car again and just how big the steering inputs are we need to make to actually get them to change direction.
You say you've spent 40 years driving mainly rwd road cars. Spend some time driving proper cars including those that understeer, oversteer and are race tuned and we can talk again. At present you don't actually have any comprehension of what understeer and oversteer really are, how easy they are to control compared to each other and why one is safe and the other isn't.
As I recall. Good quality tyres all round. .
Took the whole width of the road though. On a single carriageway corner, could mean finishing in the ditch, or on the wrong side of the road on a left hander.
Joe Average drives a FWD car, so you are right, but I think most experienced enthusiastic drivers of RWD cars will not find it a problem. I wouldn't call myself a slow driver or an exceptionally good one, but apart from when I've been exploring the limits deliberately, I have never come anywhere near to 'swapping ends' on any of my cars.
Probably because for decades I've never driven anything else, my view on the FWD v RWD debate is a little biased. :-)
I'm sure there must be others who don't feel less safe driving a RWD car, than they would in a FWD. Mike.
PS - In fact oversteer is considered to be so dangerous for the average driver that it's illegal to use crossply tyres on the rear axle if radials are on the front one. That's because crossplies run at higher slip angles than radials and as I said previously the definition of oversteer is where the rear tyre slip angles are higher than the front ones. The fact that this is not just a recommendation but actually illegal to do ought to indicate just how dangerous oversteer is considered to be and why no road cars are ever designed to do it. In fact manufacturers sometimes have to do quite extreme things to make sure oversteer, or at least loss of rear end grip, never rears its ugly head, especially on rwd cars. I'm sure most of us recall the BMW 3 series of a few models ago, maybe 1980s version, that had an extraordinary amount of negative camber on the rear wheels. When you were following one it looked like the back suspension had snapped somewhere.
The Porsche 911 is another example and one renowned for catching drivers out. With a rear end weight bias plus rwd you were fighting both a tendency to polar moment of inertia based oversteer plus power induced oversteer. You were pretty much guaranteed to lose the back end before the front and when it went it just swung round the lightly loaded front end like a hammer head with no chance of catching it. They dialled most of that out with continual suspension improvements eventually.
However just to be clear again there is a difference between over/understeer and grip. You can quite easily have a car that understeers but has less ultimate rear grip than front grip or a car that oversteers but has less ultimate front grip than rear. That's very easily arranged by using different and/or knackered tyres on one end or the other or the wrong tyre pressures. That leads to another often asked question - which end should you fit new or the best tyres to? The answer, whether it's fwd or rwd, is always fit the best tyres to the rear because losing the back end in extremis is much harder to recover from than losing the front end which will usually come back by itself if there's enough room.
Final story about good drivers and losing the back end. Most of us can take a rwd car and push the back end out a bit using the throttle in very low speed corners like a 30 mph roundabout. I used to practise it in my old Mk1 Escort 30 years ago and it stood me in good stead in later years in other cars on the rare occasion when the back end snapped out unexpectedly. However doing that at high speed is another story. Anything over 50 mph is scary territory for losing grip for most drivers. Things happen too quickly for them to recover from.
Many years ago I was being driven to a race meeting, can't remember what sort, by a race driver friend/customer in his old Sierra Estate. Like most race drivers he was actually fairly slow and steady on the road most of the time. No point risking an accident or your license on the road when you get your jollies at much higher speeds on the track. However as we came onto the right handed slip road leading round onto the M4 at Slough he couldn't resist chucking it in a bit at about 70 mph. Nothing near the limits for him or the car but enough to give him a brief buzz. However milliseconds after he threw it in the back end went big time. We weren't quite sideways but as the back end stepped out to the left I could see where we had been originally heading more easily out of the side window than the front one :)
This is the sort of stuff that sorts out the average, good and very good drivers. The average driver would just crash before reacting properly. The good driver might get some opposite lock on but either too much or not wind it off again fast enough which is the main reason for ending up in a fishtail or crashing on the inside of the bend rather than the outside of it. For Phil as a very competent race driver it was comparatively low speed stuff and no big deal. One very precise steering wheel input which was wound back off very quickly as the back end came into line and by then we'd scrubbed off a few mph. Not a hint of fishtail or overcorrection. The back end then went again the same way but less violently and he caught that one just as easily. We'd then scrubbed off enough speed to be back under the grip level and he slowed it down and pulled over onto the hard shoulder. The left rear tyre had caught a slow puncture and was down to just a few psi. We stuck the spare on and continued uneventfully. You or I would have been in the armco and/or the hospital. For him it was just another day at the office.
It was a salutory lesson in just how good a really good driver is compared to how we like to think of ourselves.
In article , Dave Baker writes
There may or may not be - hedges grow back quickly enough. Until recently I lived down a narrow twisty lane which was used as a rat-run in the morning and as a quiet way for boozers to wobble (at
60mph) back from the pub at night. Once or twice a year a car (not the same one) would plough through the hedge into my paddock. Either a boozer (one of whom brought down a telegraph pole at the same time, putting out a load of local telephones. The driver did a runner and when the Police tried to move the pole off his car it slipped and nearly brained one of the constables. They were not over-happy and called the dogs out to hunt him down, across the fields and through the woods. Country life is fun!), or one of these strange people who think they can accelerate their way out of a collision on a single track road. True, road safety has improved, but year on year there is still the same proportion of f*ck-witted drivers.
A hedge can be wrecked without the car occupants suffering injuries and those statistics won't be recorded or available.
It all down to practice within his field of work , most drivers rarely come up against that situation takes the brain quite sometime to work out wtf happening , by then its usally hedge surfing time
you friend will have had the technque hardwired into is brain because of his profession so his reaction time would be far quicker
Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.
Ask the community — no account required