I was thinking a little more, and it's not just cruise control; I prefer FWD for any highway speed driving on icy or snowy roads. It is not that uncommon for me to bomb down the left lane of an icy/snowy highway past a row of slow-moving vehicles at up to 90 mph in third gear with my foot to the floor, or as close as I can get at the limit of wheelspin, but I would not feel comfortable doing that with any RWD vehicle. AWD is good for that too, but it can be a little spooky because there is more acceleration available and you kind of float whenever all four wheels break traction under power, requiring minor steering corrections. It will still go wherever you point the steering wheel if you stay on the throttle though. The people being passed probably think I'm crazy, but I think they're crazy for trying to drive in the winter on all-seasons, so I guess we're even.
For example, a couple of years ago in the spring I was driving home from a trip to B.C. in my Mazda3 with a buddy in the passenger seat. The mountain road was covered in somewhat irregular slush and the car in front was driving slowly, so I threw it in third and punched it full throttle to pass on an uphill section. After passing, I asked my buddy if he would be willing to do that with his truck in RWD because, despite the fact that the slush would have far less effect on his 35" winter tires than my little tires, I certainly wouldn't. He replied that he would not, but he would do it in 4WD without a second thought.
The writer essentially doesn't like FWD because of power understeer and straight line stability, rather than power oversteer and the ability to rotate. But the former is exactly the way I want to feel the limit of traction on slippery roads because it requires only throttle correction and not steering correction.
In a 2009 Audi A4 review, Jack Baruth has some good commentary on the benefit of a street vehicle that would rather travel in a straight line than rotate:
Originally Posted By: Jack Baruth
Start with that idea of lightness: although the new A4 is significantly larger, a heavy dose of aluminum in the suspension and running gear means that it weighs no more than the outgoing car, once you adjust for equipment level. This sounded suspiciously like the proverbial “free lunch”, which is never free, (outside a press launch, anyway) but without a set of scales we were not able to verify the claim. What we would be able to do would be to verify the second major claim for the MLP: namely, that by reversing the orientation of the clutch pack (or in the case of Tiptronics, the torque converter) while moving the front axle forward and lengthening the wheelbase, Audi had managed to shift the A4′s traditionally front-heavy balance backwards a bit.
It’s worth taking a brief digression here to discuss whether the above is really a desirable outcome. BMW makes much hay of the fact that most of its cars have a nearly perfect 50/50 front-to-rear weight balance, and Infiniti has amassed a formidable amount of pseudo-engineering gobbledygook to suggest that the 52/48 balance of its original G35 is better than 50/50, but is a “perfect” balance really desirable in a street car? It’s possible to argue that it isn’t, and here’s why: In a street car, particularly one which will be driven at high speeds for long periods of time, straight-ahead stability is a critical asset. This becomes even more true when the road conditions are less than perfect; when hitting, say, a patch of ice at eighty miles per hour on the freeway, one’s greatest hope is that the car does not easily swap ends. Consider, for a moment, how we fix the behavior of a paper airplane which willfully refuses to fly straight. A paper clip to the nose usually does the trick, doesn’t it? To some degree, a front-engine design like Audi’s traditional longitudinal layout, which places the full mass of the motor ahead of the front wheels, is much like having a paper clip at the nose of our airplane. It tends to straighten the car out at speed, making for the most relaxing Autobahn experience possible. This, incidentally, is why your humble author finds long freeway trips to be much less stressful in his Phaeton than in his Porsche 911, as the Audiesque front-engine layout of the Phaeton inspires high-speed stability in exactly the way the 911’s rear-mounted flat-six does not. If we were to extend our paper airplane metaphor a bit, the Porsche’s a bit like putting the paper clip on the back of the plane; it may fly, but it will resist attempts to make it fly straight, because the inertia is continually moving at an axis slightly different from the path traced by the nose as a consequence of road crown, imperfect alignment, wind, you name it. In the real world, away from chat rooms, exaggerated boasts of trackday laptimes, and constant mentions of the mighty Nurburgring, an “uneven” front-biased car is often the best and safest choice. Once upon a time, in the days of that original Audi 5000, Audi was keen to emphasize the dynamic benefits of its longitudinal layout. Such a true shame that it would be marketing suicide nowadays to suggest that not every moment of a car’s life is spent in maximum-attack mode around a racetrack…
SSL 2009 Audi A4 Review
