this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
13 points (63.3% liked)

Electric Vehicles

3217 readers
219 users here now

A community for the sharing of links, news, and discussion related to Electric Vehicles.

Rules

  1. No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
  2. Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
  3. No self-promotion
  4. No irrelevant content. All posts must be relevant and related to plug-in electric vehicles — BEVs or PHEVs.
  5. No trolling
  6. Policy, not politics. Submissions and comments about effective policymaking are allowed and encouraged in the community, however conversations and submissions about parties, politicians, and those devolving into general tribalism will be removed.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

Four wheel drive is “dumb” in that it simply sends equal power to all four wheels. But if one wheel loses traction, then a quarter of your available power is wasted as that wheel just spins (this is a gross oversimplification). All wheel drive, by contrast, operates like four wheel drive but uses a fancy differential instead of a transfer case. If the system detects that one wheel loses traction, it can selectively direct power to the other wheels instead of wasting it. It can also lock the center differential so that it behaves like a transfer case if you want. I don’t know the specifics of the park service’s rules, but an all wheel drive vehicle should do just as well if not better than a four wheel drive one.