RWD BEV future, my concern...

prius has never been particularly effective in snow. i do think awd is the future, but how long until it gets here?

 

I found the RWD EVs handle much better in snow than any FWD ICE vehicle I ever drove.
While I have had a lot of winter experience in Minnesota, this does not include off-roading.

 

People were getting unstuck with RWD before the FWD revolution. It may mean being better prepared with shovels and traction aids, but I generally need those when truly stuck with FWD to.

In regards to snow, I'd think the lower ground clearance aerodynamic cars have will have a bigger impact on whether a car gets stuck than which axle is driven.

 

VW has plenty of experience with RWD rear engine cars, and specifically the foibles of that weight distribution.

I did a lot of miles in the old rear-engine ones, including a lot on soft improvised beach roads and in icy New England winters. They handled quite well in the snow and ice, and that was long before any computer-aided traction control. I'm sure it can only get better.

 

That may be so, but there won't be more weight over the non-drive wheels; that is the important bit. Then modern stability and traction control will give a lot of aid.

 

...and what I'm getting at is that steering the drive wheels looks very helpful on paper, but it never mattered that much out on the frozen roads of my driving career.

 

For performance, acceleration is great. As you have noted, it isn’t so good for winter driving.
Here is why I believe the BEVs I have driven over the last 11 winters handle the snow so much better.

A) Center of mass - The center of mass is very low in most BEVs. In the Tesla Model S the center of mass was actually below the axles. This gives incredibly stable handling.

B) Stability control - While any vehicle can have stability control, my understanding is the number of adjustments a BEV is capable of per second is far more than a ICE vehicle can manage. In my case, I have only felt stability control kick in once, while I know it has kicked in a number of times when I couldn’t feel it.

C) Far better inertia factors - In a RWD ICE, the car typically had to deal with a very large mass (the engine) that was a good distance away from the drive wheels. In a BEV (skateboard design) the weight is much more evenly distributed.

I have been stuck in snow banks many times in my life, once after an ice storm I was ‘stuck’ in my driveway. While driving BEVs over the last 11 winters, I can’t recall a single time I needed to get out of my car to get ‘unstuck’.

In my experience, RWD with winter tires handles better than AWD with ‘all season’ tires. I don’t have a very high opinion of AWD. AWD will help you get started, but it won’t help you stop.

Caveats:

• It could simply be dumb luck over 10+ years
• Some of that time I had AWD.
• Most of that time was with winter tires.
• The vast majority of the time I am driving urban/suburban roads. Less than 5% of miles were driven on rural or dirt roads.

 

I'll give you that. The only time I really thought it helped was when I was in NYC and it was time to get the car out of the snowbank street parking.

That just doesn't happen to me often enough to factor into picking a car.

I'm with you on the crossover thing.

 

My driveway is on a back alley that rarely gets plowed; mostly the snow gets packed down by others. FWD may have helped with getting out, but I still had to do plenty of digging and making sure all the wheels weren't blocked or holes.

 

My father-in-law worked at the Australian base in Antarctica in the late 60s. They had a small fleet of Beetles for getting between the buildings. He said that they'd proved to be better at handling Antarctic conditions than anything else they'd tried, apart from dog sleds.

Obviously a dog sled isn't really practical for Sydney. But he swore by Beetles after that job, and had a series of them until well into the 80s, much to the annoyance of my wife and her two brothers who all had to squeeze into the back. Whenever they complained, he said, "A Beetle was good enough to pull me out of a crevasse, so it's good enough to take you to school."