Is FWD really so bad when considering normal people...

To a point but fwd has limits lower than rwd

limits you arent likely to hit on a conefag course

and well sorted out fwd can easily compete and beat rwd even on a proper race course

If you aren't reaching limits on any track you're not doing it right.

>Then the average driver would be forced to have more hectik skills and would be more interested in thier cars and more likely to be enthusiasts of driving and cars
I guess all those soccer mom's driving 3 series are secretly gear heads

Guess what the world autotest championship is consistently won by. Yup FWD cars like Minis and Novas. The only RWD cars to have ever won the championships have been custom built 7 replicas.

>if you aren't doing 200 km/h on normal road, you aren't doing it right

youtu.be/BnQP95aVv04

FWD is safer for the average driver because of the natural tendency to understeer.

First, in case of an unavoidable collision caused by understeer, you are much more likely to hit something head-on and use the safest part of the car to take the damage for you (the front) thanks to the abundance of crumple zones compared to the back and the sides of the vehicle.

Second, understeer is much more intuitive to counteract for the average driver who has no idea how cars or even physics work. You lift the gas off, slam the brakes and hope for the best, which is a "technique" that has the advantage of loading the front wheels more, potentially stopping the understeer condition right there and then. If the car won't stop going straight, refer to point 1.
People a tiny bit smarter could realise that reducing steering angle also helps towards recovering from understeer, but the brake load alone could be enough for most non-extreme situations.

This is why pretty much every single car produced since people started caring about safety (including RWD cars) has been engineered to be understeering to some degrees, of course excluding most super/hyper/track cars because they have been made for a completely different target audience that wants a fun and thrilling experience.

People have the tendency to apply their logic to everyone and assume every driver (including themselves) knows how to react in such an emergency situation. They don't, most people don't know how to handle cars and don't even care, nobody is going to teach them how to use the throttle to gradually stop a power spin or how a completely counter-intuitive reaction during an emergency (releasing brakes/accelerating) is going to stop the loose end from slipping and saving them.

This is not even an argument in favour of FWD, it's that FWD cars happen to understeer a lot more and can't physically be made to power slide, making them the safer choice for dumb, average drivers.

>Pushing limits means top speed

Limits is usually the brakes and tires

>You lift the gas off, slam the brakes and hope for the best
It was a while I did driving school, but I think I recall that there was an actual way how counteract understeer that did not involve giving up

Reducing the steering angle can solve pretty much any mild understeer (like wet conditions at City speeds, nothing really dangerous) without doing absolutely nothing else, but most of the time you end up in a trajectory that needs to be corrected anyway so you'll have to slow down eventually unless you have lots of free space to be dumb with.

But steering less is not as intuitive as the go-to panic reaction that is braking for the average driver.
So yeah, there are multiple ways to fight understeer, just like with oversteer, but some are easier to do than others for most people.

Snap oversteer is caused by weight transfer and can affect FRs as well, just like FRs can understeer and FFs can oversteer; over/understeer isn't exclusive to any drivetrain layout.

Try living above the arctic circle and you find that it is.

...

nah this is pushing the limits

That is how you spot normies. Also, sports cars are race cars, body roll means less grip and lowering springs make you corner faster.

That's what you would think, if everything you knew about handling, you learned from Top Gear.

Pulling the handbrake works, but you have to anticipate the understeer so far in advance, it has no bearing to safe driving on normal roads.

My miata has both liftoff oversteer after hard braking and snap oversteer after any oversteer if you overcorrect and don't gas it enough

Many a cone has died at the hands of the miata's deadly handling characteristics. RWD = you have to know how to drive.

With FWD, gas it, slam on the brakes, whatever happens, front wheels will do their thing and you won't spin out too badly, or in the opposite direction you were expecting to spin out.

RWD cars should be in a separate license class that requires special training. If a newb can pendulum their miata through a field of cones, what happens to an even bigger newb on a highway exit who slams on the brakes and cranks the wheel when the car starts to slide? They snap in the opposite direction and die hitting a wall.

this
its not without a reason that most (if not every) widowmaker is a rwd
rwd needs a special mindset and knowledge, most of people that buy rwd as their first cars end up on a wall or a tree in 1 year time

If you live where it snows, FWD is easier for DD usage by normies, as a bit of fish tailing can be easily compensated for with the steering, as opposed to RWD that requires a bit more thought and practice. That said, I drive a notoriously ass-heavy FWD in the winter, and can make sweet drifturu if I want by flicking the wheel, but I can recover easily by giving it a bit more gas. If I take it easy, the car handles pretty normally.

Also, as an aside, I'm a conefag, I use FWD and I beat on and humiliate Miatas, FRS/BRZ/GT86s, Golf Rs, and even an R32 in my PT Cruiser GT. It's gutted, caged, has stiffened suspension, and it's tuned to make 308HP/322ft-lbs at the wheels, but it's still a 3000lb FWD.
I think it's more about the driver than the car, at least to a degree.

Because widowmakers are faster than any fwd.

Why are normies so bad at everything?

Not all RWD cars handle like that, in fact I'd say most don't. Cars like the C-class are perfectly normie-safe. Same for non-M BMWs. It's not about safety, it's about cost. FWD is cheaper.

many countries have snow in winter, average joe would rather not slip and hit someone else because he put too much throttle into it. Also, it's better for winter car to have engine near powered wheels - it's easier to get stuck in the snow when your powered wheels have something around quater of car mass on them.

i live in winter country and i have fwd. i hate my life

average person cant drive
so its not too important

Try going to an ice track sometime, make you hate your life a little less.

Same senpai. Studded tires going 10 mph and you will still slide with FWD here. I'm in the US, but far northeast.

I just realized every car I've ever driven has been a FWD. (Well I might have started on 4WD but I bet it was FWD)

What am I missing out on?

Not much, really.
Despite the memes, you can still have a lot of fun in either layout. Yes it is possible to go sideways in a fwd or awd on the backroad twisties, on underpowered shitboxes it just requires more balls and better suspension. Literally anything you can do in a RWD you can do in a FWD.

Remember, most people who post here have only driven their moms automatic minivan and are obsessed with chinese cartoons. RWD doesn't make the car a god machine.

This is not true

You can drift with momentum but not in the same way. It will never be the same

>ef civic and ls1 trans am guy here

>le not true drifting
I count going sideways and staying sideways through a corner as drifting. All cars can do that, it's just the easiest and simplest in RWD.

I'm split on the FWD vs RWD debate, so heres a question I have:

If FWD does have its merits, why do we never see high end or even super cars in FWD? They're all RWD or AWD. Unless there are some and I just don't know.

FWD's merits are valued in econoboxes (easier/cheaper to assemble keeping costs low, less drivetrain loss boosting fuel economy, more cabin space for maximum practicality) but it starts to struggle putting down power when you hit about 300hp.
For anything performance-oriented, the drawbacks of FWD matter much more than its benefits, and RWD or AWD's capability to put lots of power down effectively is more important than interior space, fuel economy or low cost.

So then... whats the debate here?

Shitposting.
Generally speaking, below 300hp, overall chassis setup matters way more than which pair of wheels the power goes to.

>FWD car accelerates
>its weight transfers to the back wheels
>car can't accelerate

A lot of track / kit cars are FWD, it depends on the use. Engine size and the room they have to work with also plays a big part. Huge engine means you can't stuff both the engine and transmission in sideways, so its easier to put the transmission between you and the passenger, resulting in rwd. This is just one of the MANY reasons for FWD or RWD.

Veeky Forums : superiority complexes and bench racing.

>His civic can't do a wheelie with just a few simple mods

>muh sideways

Drifting is a controlled 4 wheel slide that requires countersteering

Unless your burning the rear tires it doesnt count either

Neat, me and everyone else that go to drift events are doing it wrong.

Thanks for letting us know!

>4 wheel slide
You know why drift cars have a shit ton of negative camber on the front wheels, right? It's so they have the most grip when they are being turned. You need to have grip on the front two tires to control the slide. 4 wheel sliding is called driving into the guardrail

I guess this isn`t drifting then

youtube.com/watch?v=otmaRuQNSTA

That's an interesting take on the sport. Quite neat too.