Actually, my dream car shouldn’t be too far off in the future: four-cylinder hybrid BMW. Preferably convertible.
The BMW element is solely because of the rear-wheel drive aspect, which I threatened TD I’d explain, because to have true duoistic tendencies, a certain level of gearheaded skill is required. Obviously one must first love machines — cars, motorcycles, planes, hell, any thing with an engine — but it’s not enough to love ‘em. Or maybe it is, but it’s just so much more once you know how they work. For me, at least. The hybrid element? Well, I’d want it for the ecological kindness (and the awesome gas mileage!) but not for another four or five years — not until parts and repair costs come down, engine knowledge goes up with more mechanics versed in it, and there’s more of a track record for existing hybrids on life span expectancy. Look, of the cars I’ve owned, my current Golf is the youngest ever (purchased at 1yr old) and it’s now eight years old and a few hundred miles shy of 150K. I like cars that are, uh, broken in. So to speak.
Anyway. A little history, first. I learned to drive on the quintessential 80’s zippy car, the VW Rabbit. Hrm, ours was an ‘83, I think. In rainy or snowy weather, it was the only car I was allowed to drive, because of its front-wheel drive. The rest of the time my father (rather reluctantly and with much lecturing) would hand over the keys to the Volvo 740 — this was back before Volvo switched to front-wheel drive, in the 900-class, I think. Driving a 740 with rear wheel drive doesn’t really give one a very good impression of the capabilities of RWD, since it’s a heavy, rather sedate car, anyway. (Unless my father’s driving, in which case you’ll have gray hairs before you’ve gone two miles, and in snow, he’s a complete terror.) Anyway, for a 16-yr old, that’s a lot of car to try and get any spunky action from, really. First, it’s a damn refridgerator on wheels. It’s a box. It’s a brick. It’s like the second uncoolest car, after a wood-paneled family station wagon. I mean, you never feel like you’re going fast, even when you are. And in my family, the rule is: it doesn’t matter how fast you can go, as long as you sound like you’re going fast. Hence the rather obnoxious size of the butterfly valves on my 914, and my father’s constant tuning of the 911’s carbs, as well as his propensity for driving in first gear at 5000 rpm. Nyah. We don’t need no stinkin’ stereos, not when our engines can set off your car alarm just by driving past.
Yes! Life was good when I was young…
It all started when I turned, hm, 14, and my mother scheduled her mid-life crisis. (My father was on a business trip to Jordan, and we could hear him yelling over the phone — from several feet away — DON’T LET YOUR MOTHER BUY ANYTHING TIL I GET HOME!) My parents bought a 912 (four-cylinder engine, in 911 body) Targa from its original owner. We spent four years restoring the car, and damn if that engine weren’t as gorgeous — if not more so — than the paint job and interior. It was a great car, but it did get coddled to a certain extent, and boy did my parents dump money into it. No expenses spared. My mom’s pretty much a European sports car kinda person; she purchased her first car as a senior in college, an Austin-Healey Sprite, and kept it for about 10 years before selling it to two college kids who promised to love and cherish it on pain of death, etc. So naturally when I looked at cars a few years later, I ended up with an Austin-Healey ‘68, 4000 class, I think. Wasn’t a Big Healey (6-cylinder), but a poor, beatup little thing with a slipping clutch and iffy brakes.
Despite the fact that the clutch slipped (and we won’t even mention the seatbelts other than to say driving with a rope across your lap seems kinda…well, why bother), which meant half the time I applied gas there was no catch and therefore no power, it was the nimblest car I’d ever driven. Just…unbelievable. The engine was in such bad shape, my father ended up helping me pick out and purchase a ‘66 Austin-Healey as a parts car. That’s the car we were halfway through stripping when I accidentally put a screwdriver through the rear panel, over the wheel well. Right. I put a screwdriver through the panel…only to discover, upon tearing the screwdriver out, that most of the panel came with it. Turned out someone had the brilliant idea that instead of scrubbing, rustproofing, and doing body work, they’d do bodywork. With duct tape. And tinfoil. And…plaster spackling. And then they spray-painted it. So. I look to that and say, that time I used the paperclips and duct-tape to fix my Porsche? Not ever as bad as plaster spackling. Ever.
Eventually I realized I needed a car that could actually, like, go, if I wanted to be able to drive, and purchased a friend’s Porsche 914 on a whim. Decent shape, not excessive number of miles, but…man, did I hate that car at first. I loathed it. 914s are like the eyesore of Porsches. They look like TR-7s, a little, with a roofline that’s whacked and a strangely flattened boot and bonnet, and they’re mid-engine, too. And it was ORANGE. Tell me that isn’t a bizarre-looking creation.
But, see, then I drove it. Woah. Did I mention woah? Try double woah. And holy fuck. And crap-I-just-passed-a-harley-on-a-mountain-road-fuck.
First, if you stood at the boot of the 914 and looked under the belly, it gave the strangest impression of the wheels curving inwards from bottom to top, just a little. Almost as though the body were so heavy it was pushing the wheels out & the car was sinking in the middle — and it only weighed 2000 lbs (in contrast, the Austin-Healeys each weighed about 2600 pounds) — even though the wheels and the body were actually balanced just fine. It was an optical illusion, thanks to the car’s lines, but nothing changed the fact that due to the weight distribution, the body design, the placement of the engine, and the car’s low center of gravity, the car drove like it was frickin’ glued to the pavement. Someone told me at one point that the car’s center of gravity was two feet below the surface of the road (and it sure drove like it), but the detail I do know is that the car’s center of gravity is at the same point as the car’s geometrical center. Meaning, if you took an overhead image of the car and determined its exact center, then figured the center of gravity for the car, the two overlap.
So it was a substantially lighter car, with mid-engine, low center of gravity, and rear wheel drive. However, it drove like my father’s Volvo when it came to steering (both in that they’re both RWD cars and in that the Porsche felt like power-assisted steering). That’s compared to the Austin-Healey, which did take a bit of arm muscle (compared to the cars on which I’d learned to drive, both of which had power-assisted). The Austin-Healey’s engine sat on top of the steering mechanism, and ya sure felt the weight when driving. It was a light car compared to when power steering went out on my 240DL Volvo a few years later — and BOY did I work up some arm muscles driving that car without power steering! — but in the Porsche, it felt like I had not just power-assisted but outright power steering. Almost no weight on the steering mechanism, so that made turning (and a tight turn radius, too) even easier and responsive.
The rear wheel drive is the most important detail (since the chances of me finding a midengine BMW are probably nil). In the cars now, if you drive a FWD and compare it to the few RWDs out there (BMW, I think some Mercedes, and a few sports cars), for the most part they’ll feel somewhat the same. The computers do a lot of the work — balancing slip, dealing with traction, etc — but I really don’t like cars with computers, given the choice. So this is a comparison of a car with minimal computer (the old VW Rabbit) and car completely sans computer (the Porsche 914).
The first place you’ll see the difference is starting from a complete stop. Say, at a stop light. When you put on the gas and the car moves forward, the inertia is pulling the car backwards: nose goes up, butt sinks. It’s doing the same to you, to a limited extent, and you can feel the drag (or a sudden being-thrown-back if my mother’s driving). This means the weight of the car is landing predominantly on the rear wheels, and the front wheels (even with the engine) aren’t getting quite as much traction. In RWD, the back tires are getting the weight, which doubles their traction, and you’re pushed away from a stop into going. Make sense?
There’s also increased efficiency when it comes to braking. Although a mid-engine is even more evenly distributed (ideally) than the average front-engine RWD, the RWD design of the engine distributes the weight a bit more proportionately. Anyway, because of this distribution of weight, it means that when you go to brake, the nose goes down and the butt goes up. But in FWD, this happens more– because the nose already weighs more. In RWD, the extra weight on the back means the back wheels are still getting some drag, which means all four braking systems are getting worked, and the stopping distance is shortened. In a FWD car, the front brakes are doing most of the work. With the weight shift, the back tires don’t get quite as much traction so aren’t able to add any real significant braking power — which means one set of brakes is going to get twice as much work in everyday driving.
And then…there are the turns. Excuse me while I have a moment of bliss for the turns in my 914. (Ah, I should probably mention I also had 14.5″ rims, but my father hounded the local tire dealership to put on 15″ Pirellis, so I had big fat tires on my 914. Oh. My. God. I think I wore those puppies out on Rt 314 in four months, doing the back Virginia roads at top speeds. When you can take a 90-degree turn at 35 mph in a frickin’ street car, you are one seriously blissed-out puppy.
See, in FWD, the front axle is doing two things: propelling (pulling) the car, and turning. In RWD, these actions are split up, with the front axle turning and the back axle ‘pushing’ the car. If you’ve ever accelerated on a snowy road from one lane to another while simultaneously putting on the gas, you know how easy it is to lose control when the same axle applying power is also breaking the car’s line. So in RWD, when you’re turning and applying power, the rear part just keeps adding power as needed, and you can corner better because the line of power applied isn’t broken at the point of application. (Man, I should draw a picture for that. Pix, if you need one, I will. Ffft!)
That double-action for the front axle is also the reason why when you start from a dead stop in FWD, the car pulls to one side or another. It’s not your tires; it’s the stupid car. It’s an uneven distance between the drive shafts that connect the engine to the front axle — one is just a little bit longer than the other, and gets wound up a bit more. Once you’re at a steady pace, this evens out, but the torque’s there at acceleration. It can happen when you’re accelerating while moving, too, because the power applied to the engine will twist it on its mountings, and this is translated to the axle through the uneven drive shafts. Hmm, roughly like that. I’ve been told there are some really nice cars out there that don’t do this, but I’ve never driven a FWD that doesn’t. In RWD, though, the drive shaft goes from the front of the car (or the middle, in the Porsche) to the rear axle down a center differential. It dissects the axle, meaning the distance from drive shaft to axle is the same for each wheel, plus it’s more stable — it doesn’t have an engine sitting smack dab on top of the axle and thus impacting the axle and drive shafts every time the engine shifts. (And engines do shift, just a little. If you ever watch one turn over while the hood’s up, you’ll see it kinda do a little bounce in one direction and back again. That’s normal, but it will affect the driving.)
In turning, the other big deal is the traction. Think of the hollywood stunt drivers where cars come up on two wheels, and you have the exaggerated aspect of what happens when turning (and why highway exit ramps are banked). The car’s inertia, in a turn, is slanting, so the interior wheels get less traction and the exterior wheels get more. The car’s weight shifts towards the outside. In a neutrally-balanced car (where the axles each carry roughly equal amounts of weight), the handling is better because both outer wheels have traction. If the weight is all on the front, though, when you turn, now the car’s weight is pushed towards the front outer wheel. That gives you basically one tire solidly in full traction, one less so (the rear outside), one kinda (front inside) and one really not enough to count (rear inside). In FWD, remember the front axle’s powering the car and steering it, so it’s a bit more sluggish — really, it can do both okay but it’s happier doing one thing at a time. This is where you get understeer.
And this is where, if you ever drive a RWD car, you will discover that you’re either someone better off sticking to a minivan, or you’ve just broken your own heart because you’ve discovered you’re an absolute speed freak and you know you’ll never manage to find the same joy in your everyday FWD boxy hatchback. *sigh* Okay. FWD: you’re heading into a curve. The front wheels – trying to do two things at once – start to lose traction. If you don’t bring the car under control, you’re gonna be in the ditch. To correct this loss of traction, you turn the wheel sharper and slow down (thus giving the wheels more traction.) But in RWD, if you start to lose control in the pushing-wheels, it’ll feel like you’re about to fishtail. (I did it once in the Volvo. It was pretty cool, actually.) A RWD car will ‘oversteer’ — meaning the rear-end is trying to move forward and swing around, pushing you into an even tighter turn. If, say, you’re making a left-hand turn, the front end is going to end up pointed towards the cars sitting at the stop sign. Which means to correct oversteer in RWD, you do the reverse of FWD: you turn away from your corner (turn less = corrects oversteer) and increase the gas. Gives more power to the rear wheels, shifts the inertia temporarily to the back, creates more traction, wheels catch, and off you go.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can beat a RWD car around a corner. FWD can beat it on the straightaway — and a really good driver could hold his own on the corners against a RWD car’s driver that doesn’t know what he’s doing — but if you take two equal drivers, the one in the RWD will blow the FWD away. Hands down. I can’t recall where I read it now — must’ve been a year or two ago? — but someone described RWD as a hedonist’s car. In FWD, to correct on any issue, you have to slow down. Doing curves too fast in FWD, and the car’s going to give you troubles. In RWD, to bring the car in line, you go faster. I mean, does that frickin’ rock, or what? Yes. I say so, at least.
Err, granted, it’s possible to achieve this kind of tight turning in a FWD. I did spend hours poring over this gadget you could add onto the dashboard that would register your turns, the torque, the engine speed, the angle, all sorts of good things, and give you feedback on when and where you should apply power. Never did buy one; I was saving up for a mercury balancer. Anyway, the articles I read while pondering the day I’d have money for this nifty computerized gadget also discussed the turning process (of turn versus application of power versus lessening of power) for FWD compared to RWD. To get a tight turn on FWD, then, you slow down sharply just as you come into the curve. This shifts the weight of the car abruptly forward, puts more traction on the front tires, and you can get a tighter turn. It will also drive your passengers bonkers, but who cares about them? We’re talking about the driver’s pleasure.
However, I find it highly unsatisfactory to brake going into a turn. I do it now without thinking — accelerate, hit the just-barely-turning, pop the brakes, and glide through the turn as tight as I want — but it’s still…it’s just not as much fun. (If you enter a corner too slow with FWD and try to accelerate while turning, you’ll understeer = go wide.) With the Porsche, I’d accelerate into a corner, and at the 30-degree in or so, would give it a bit more gas. Off I go, pulling away from the corner like I’m frickin’ hell on wheels. Okay, so having my suspension and shocks at the tightest possible probably didn’t hurt, but whatever. I liked a rough ride, and when you’re only three inches off the ground, you will feel every single bump. Believe me, you’ll feel all of them. I did the Cross Bronx Expressway while hounded by an eighteen-wheeler, and I caught air going over some of those damn potholes. (If you ever look in the rear-view mirror and see nothing but grill, you’d put on the gas, too.) I never really pushed the car on straightaways; I was too careful since I did all the work on the engine myself (except for help when it came to brake issues, because it’s hard to bleed brakes with just one person), but when it came to curves…I left everything behind.
*sigh*
There’s one last thing I gotta say about why FWD is so prevalent now. See, FWD allows for a more compact design, hence lighter cars, which means better gas mileage. The Porsche 914 is a two-seater, although its wheelbase was actually longer than my current VW golf – yet my Porsche was 2000 lbs, and my current Golf GTI is only 2600lbs, yet it’s a four-door hatchback with waaaay more room. For a rear-wheel drive with the same amt of room as my Golf, the weight would be considerably more. So that’s the trade-off, in that by flipping the engine so it’s squeezed up at the front, the car can be more efficient in other ways. And even my old Subaru 2-door hatchback (with on-demand AWD) weighed in at 1700 pounds — and none are necessarily the plastic-and-whatever of today’s Saturns, for instance.
But there are also things about RWD that make ‘em cheaper in the long run — less wear on the brakes, like I mentioned. And there aren’t any CV joints on a RWD car, either. CV joints connect the engine to the axle; if you turn in a FWD and hear CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK — that’s your CV joints going bad. It can happen sooner than you expect because of that torquing action, and they’re expensive to replace. RWD doesn’t have engine-powering-turning-axle, so it uses universal joints, which are slower to wear out and cheaper to replace.
Tagged: machinery, structural design