rwd + switchable awd on the fly rocks. my fj does it.. wish our RL did too.

 

I happen to live in the Northeast, I could not disagree with you more!

With equal quality snow tires I'll take a Subaru Outback into places you will never get in an Accord, and I will do it more safely and with greater confidence.

Many people buy AWD because they are not car people and don't want summer toys and winter drivers, so AWD allows then to have a very confident winter ride, that also works just fine in the summer.

 

Or in heavy rain...........

 

Sure you CAN do a lot of things with a CRX or an S2k, but if I was going snowboarding and I had an s2k and a wrx in the garage, I sure as hell wouldn't consider taking the s2k.

Didn't your father ever teach you to use the right tool for the job?

 

I can just compare my 300 hp Sti to my 300 hp IS350. It rains here a lot. With the Sti, you stomp it and it grips and launches off the line like a hooker chasing a line of coke. In my Is350, you barely stomp it and it just peels out with no grip. I prefer AWD still.

 

Someone correct me if I'm wrong...but wasn't there a period where Audi's winnings at the LeMans became a contravertial matter due to its AWD platform and the advantages it provided over the RWD competitors?

 

awd is an advantage, there's no doubt. the ability to transfer torque to the front wheels is not a minus; it's a plus. it's more capability.

whether that's worth the weight, complexity, and cost is a value judgement, and that can be debated until we're all blue in the face. without a common set of values, there is no one right answer to that question.

 

Audi won Le Mans with RWD cars. They did do very well in IMSA competition with AWD cars at one point, but that's not as telling as it first appears.

There's pretty much no such thing as an "anything goes" racing class -- classes generally have restrictions on things like weight, tire size, engine displacement and induction, etc. Whether a FWD, RWD, or AWD platform wins is a sanctioned race has more to do with how the rules were written for that driveline type than it does with outright superiority. For example, in SCCA autocross' Street Modified class, FWD cars have a lighter minimum weight than RWD cars, which in turn have a lighter minimum weight than AWD cars. The implication here is that, at the same weight and all other things being equal, an AWD car would be expected to outperform a RWD car, which would be expected to outperform a FWD car. I think this would hold for road racing as well, but the example doesn't transfer well to the real world, because in practice FWD cars are lighter than RWD cars, which are in turn lighter than AWD cars.