With RWD there are advantages of a purer steering feel, and a balance to the way the car drives. Audi has always had cars which lacked balance due to the engine being hung so far in front of the wheels. I never understood why Audi persisted with such a ridiculous architecture: a longitude engine attached to a gearbox, BOTH of which are placed ahead of the front wheel axis. Imagine driving a bike with heavy shopping bag attached a metre ahead of the front wheel. Each time you braked, the bike would want to tip forward and since the front wheel was doing most of the braking, it would be much more likely to break traction. At every turn the bike would want to plough straight on. Audi cars are like this, although allot better than they were a few years ago.

RWD would allow the whole engine gearbox package to sit further back in the wheelbase, but there are disadvantages of packaging and cost. Is there a third way? Yes. The most obvious is to sit the engine transverse i.e. sideways rather than long ways. This may not be possible if the engine is too long. Another way is to sit the engine further back and have a little driveshaft running forward to the wheels. This was done on the second generation Honda Legend, after Honda decided for refinement reasons on a long ways engine.

So a change on Audi cars is well overdue –really they need to do something to their drivetrain to go to the next level.

I never understood why Audi persisted with such a ridiculous architecture

Update

Audi decided against rear wheel drive. Instead they moved the front wheels a few CM further forward, with a little driveshaft taking power to wheels. Quite a neat solution. However, not difficult engineering wise -so why has it taken so long? (Honda did this when moving from Legend Mark1 to Legend Mark2 in 1991).

This article is sponsored by Proqul Ozone store who supply the Ozonology Sanitisation service.