The clearest example today is the Toyota 86 / Subaru BRZ. To an auto enthusiast on a budget, there is a short list of cars they want. So short in fact that if you want to leave the showroom with a new, relatively simple and lightweight rear-drive sports coupe for less than $25K, the 86 stands alone. But almost any car is faster than an 86. Hell, most delivery vans will embarrass it in a stoplight drag race. You can get much faster cars for that money, but you can not get a rear-drive performance car without spending more. So what is so special about rear-drive, and why is it so hard to find?
The second part of the question is easier to answer – why is it so hard to find a rear wheel drive car? Cars are made by companies that exist only to pay dividends to investors, line the pockets of crooked politicians, and provide crap coffee to their employees. As such, soulless engineers conspire with unimaginative bean counters to ensure only efficiently produced products see the light of day. Safety, packaging, weight, and production efficiency are more important than any perceived advantage rear wheel drive may provide. The economies of mass production dictate front wheel drive cars. That is one reason why the Honda Accord Sport is quantifiably better than a BMW 320i in every way, even though it is $10K less expensive. It is so much harder for BMW to produce the drab little 320i than it is for Honda to churn out the Accord that it pales in comparison despite a large price gap. In all empirical measures, and to most people, the Honda is the better car.
Or is it? To answer the first part of the question – what’s so special about a rear wheel drive car – I’m forced to employ hyperbole and bad metaphors to illustrate very complex physics. Moving a two-ton object across the face of the planet requires a lot of energy. The simplest example of this would be a sizable chunk of rock rolling down a hill. As long as there is enough momentum to overcome friction, the rock will continue to roll. In order to change the direction of the rock, a small Alpine village must be placed in its path. Several crushed chocolate kitchens later, the rock has gained a new heading, but somebody has to clean up all that cocoa. That is basically what the front tires of your car do. They don’t really care about spilled cocoa, but they do determine the vector of a two-ton object. It’s hard work to move that kind of mass around, but it is achieved easily enough with the same steering mechanism that has been around since the invention of the wheel.
However, not only must the front tires determine the direction of travel, they must also perform most of the car’s the braking duties. Rear wheel only brakes are great to a ten-year-old on a BMX. However, the idea of pullin’ a bitchin’ 180 would terrify the average driver. As a result, not only do the front tires tell the car where to go, they determine the speed at which the car may travel. So of the three possible motions of a car – turning, braking, and accelerating – the front tires are totally awesome at the turning and braking stuff. Two out of three ain’t bad. But asking them to be responsible for everything – turning, braking, and accelerating – would be like asking you to make love to a beautiful woman, in front of your mother, while defusing a bomb. Something is going to go horribly wrong.
So, if asking the front wheels to be responsible for every motion of the car is such a bad idea, why are there so many front wheel drive cars? Because until you go really, really fast, most people can not tell the difference between any car, be it front wheel drive, all wheel drive, or warp drive. Why invest the extra money in a rear wheel drive car when there are no practical benefits? Most people who buy a BMW or Mercedes do so because they are able to, and have no idea which end of the car is driven. But they have some idea of what successful people drive, and many times it is a car that is expensive enough to be rear wheel drive.
But in reality, none of this matters. When it comes down to it, the combination of modern tires and computers defy physics. Even those of us who drive aggressively enough to realize the benefits of rear wheel drive usually end up with front wheel drive cars. A case in point, the Ford Fiesta ST, probably the homeliest of all sporting cars, is an absolute riot. It’s a playful little puppy of a car. It’s fun all of the time. It is fast enough to enjoy the sense of speed, but not so fast that you can never use its performance. Meanwhile the Dodge Challenger, in all its Honest-to-God American Hemi V8 glory, is an absolute pig. Excessive weight and size combined with a chassis that dates back to the Reagan administration conspire to eliminate any rear wheel drive advantage. It is simply horrible to drive, despite its available power.
So what is the point? Maybe that it doesn’t really matter which wheels are driven. Back before the late 90’s Honda Prelude SH, real sports cars were rear wheel drive. Period. But cars like the old Prelude SH, and modern cars like the Fiesta ST, Civic Type R, and Golf GTi prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that front wheel drive can deliver attainable performance without the added weight and complexity of rear wheel drive. Regardless, find something you like and learn to drive it in a way that you may have an opinion on such things. Then go online and realize just how wrong you are.
