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RWD always - Dry, wet, snow, ice. Give me a RWD car with 55 - 60% of the weight on the rear axle. Hard to do with a combustion car and still have usable storage but very easy to do with an EV.
Why RWD? It is better for vehicle dynamics. In a FWD car the front wheels are doing double duty - steering and moving the car. If a driver applies too much power or brakes in a FWD car they lose traction and steering.
Also a FWD car shifts weight off the drive wheels when accelerating or going up a hill.
Why rear bias? Again it helps vehicle dynamics. Under acceleration weight transfers to the rear axle increasing available grip. (good for RWD / bad for FWD) Under braking weight shifts forward and more equally loads the tires compared to a vehicle with a forward weight bias. Cars with heavy front axle bias like many FWD cars and unloaded pickups shift almost all their weight to the front axle under heavy braking. The rear tires have almost no load and can't provide much braking.
Understeer vs Oversteer:
Understeer is more dangerous. The one good thing about understeer is that if an novice driver freaks out and does nothing when the front end looses traction the car will eventually self recover. That is the only good thing. The big downsides are that with understeer you lose steering and the front of the car slides.
Say you are going around a corner and apply too much power or brakes and the car understeers. On a right hand curve the car will drift into oncoming traffic - boom head on collision. On a left hand curve the car drift off the road and onto the shoulder were grip is much less than on the road.
With oversteer it is the rear end stepping out. The driver still has steering and when the vehicle recovers it is still in the correct lane and on the road. Yes, the rear end my slide into out of the lane temporarily but if the driver responds correctly it comes back inline with the front almost on the original path.
Finally worst case scenario and I completely lose control - I would rather be going off the road or into oncoming traffic backwards than frontwards. Crumple zones are huge on the rear of a car and the collision force will drive you back into your seat - spreading the impact over the entire body. With a forward collision the force is concentrated just along the seatbelt and the head suffers whiplash.
The best handling car I've ever owned was a 1972 Porsche 914. Not much power but SO much grip.
The addition of stability control only even further helps the case for RWD. The car will attempt to correct the skid itself and reacts almost instantaneously to the lose of traction. In early 2020 I had a BMW 330i as a rental during a couple day snowstorm in North Carolina. Even on all-season tire the car did great. No issue with traction accelerating and stable braking. I got a good indication of how much stability control can do when I went to an empty parking lot and tried to so some donuts. Standard mode I could barely get any wheelspin. Turn off traction control and I could spin the rear wheelsl as much as I like in a straight line but the car absolutely refused to allow me to do donuts. It would let the rear end come out 30 - 45 degrees but then the stability control came on, straightened out the slide, and ruined the fun.
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