Let's say I pull one back wheel off a Metro to make a trike like this one. Let's say the empty car had 60% weight on the front axle and 40% on the rear, stock. Let's say it weighs 2000 lbs; there is 1200 lbs on the front axle and 800 on the rear. Definitely a huge forward weight bias right? As a four-wheeler each front tire has 600 lbs on it and each rear tire has 400. When we remove one back wheel, the remaining back wheel now has 800 lbs on it- MUCH more than each front at 600 lbs even though it "still has more weight on the front"! When the rear contact patch(es) are more heavily loaded than the front(s), it is easy to get oversteer.
Oversteer isn't automatically a bad thing- I have several rear-heavy cars. But it can get drivers who are accustomed to understeer in trouble.
Quote:
|
Of course 2 tire front wheel drive pulls out / handles significantly differently than a one rear wheel drive pushes / handles
|
Without getting too far into the dynamics of handling by now getting into accelerating and decelerating in corners, as far as steady state corning, fwd or rwd shouldn't matter.
Actually I think fwd would have been the way to go on a consumer Aptera, but it has to be done right.