Every year right around this time, millions of consumers are tricked into a massive financial and lifestyle mistake as the natural incompatibility of snowy roads and safe driving take them by surprise. Therefore, I will buy a enormous four-wheel drive truck for the safety of my family. Or at least a Subaru. Just like any other great marketing-fueled deception, automakers have captured both our irrational fear of loss and desire for status, and channeled them into a product line that just happens to be more profitable for them.
The reason I can state so confidently that the AWD hype is pure marketing bullshit is simple physics. Car safety depends at the core on two things: not crashing into anything , and not letting anything crash into you. To accomplish those goals, the ability to steer your car in the direction of your choice is the top factor, with braking coming as a close second.
A certain amount of acceleration is important as well, but not nearly as critical as the first two: note the extremely low collision rate of transport trucks and city buses per mile traveled. Every car, truck, and SUV has four wheels. And every one of them has front-wheel-steering and all-wheel braking. The place where the safety in accident-avoidance starts to diverge is:. And in some cases it will send you into the ditch faster than front-wheel drive.
A front wheel drive vehicle with snow tires would have more grip. According to this Consumer Reports test on snow tires vs. AWD, the tires were by far the most important factor. All wheel drive is a performance feature, not a safety feature. With all other things being equal, AWD lets you accelerate more quickly on slippery roads. This is usually a bad thing, because it masks the true slipperiness of the road from you, leading to overconfidence which will put you into the ditch, courtroom, or emergency room.
But it is useful if you need to plow through unusually deep snow in conditions that would normally get you stuck for example a steep snowy driveway, or if you run a snow plow. I have nothing against all wheel drive. The thing that pisses me off is that people have started using AWD for no reason on paved roads. Here we are, a society who has spent trillions of dollars building a road network so wide and glassy smooth that you can get almost anywhere in the country in all seasons even if you are driving a foot tractor trailer rig, and we are still wasting money driving off-road vehicles on it.
