Front-Wheel Drive

Vehicles that are front-wheel drive use the front two wheels to move. This means that the engine of your car is only powering the front wheels and not the back ones. Front-wheel drive cars are often the cheapest to manufacture. Front-wheel drive cars have the added bonus of having more traction on slippery or steep terrain due to how the weight of the engine is distributed over the front two wheels.

Rear-Wheel Drive

Rear-wheel drive vehicles use the back two wheels to move. This means that your engine is only powering your back two wheels and not powering the front wheels. Many trucks use rear-wheel drive as they often have heavy cargo in the back of the truck putting weight on the back two wheels to give the truck more traction when hauling.

Related: Front Wheel Vs Rear Wheel Explained

What is Four-Wheel Drive?

Four-wheel drive can also be known as 4WD or 4x4.

This type of vehicle has a drive train that is capable of powering all four wheels of your car at the same time. 4WD is typically meant for Yellow Jeep going off-roading at the beach vehicles with off-road or all-terrain capabilities. 4WD works by splitting the power 50/50 across the front and back wheels.

Most modern 4WD drive cars only use the 4WD capabilities some of the time, and typically they need to be activated. Modern vehicles activate their 4WD through an electronic button or switch, but older models may use a manual level. This ability to switch the 4WD on and off allows the driver to use their 4WD in conditions where you may need more traction and then switch to 2WD when these features are not needed for efficiency.

4WD is best used in rough terrain situations.

What is All-Wheel Drive?

All-wheel drive (AWD) is a more recent invention in cars, and more complicated than 2WD or 4WD.

AWD powers all the wheels of your car at the same time and uses a differential to send power to wheels through the path of least resistance into the wheel with the least grip. The car does this through using three differentials (basically a box of gears), a back, front and center differential to split the power across the wheels.

Most modern cars AWD systems are powered by computers that read a variety of sensors to get information about wheel speed and traction that allow the system to know how to send power to each individual wheel.

AWD vehicles are useful in a wide variety of situations and can go from pavement to slippery snow conditions seamlessly.

4WD vs. AWD

At a glance, 4WD and AWD may look very similar. In both 4WD and AWD the engine powers all four wheel on the car at the same time. Both drivetrains will also provide you with more traction overall than 2WD cars.

Differentials

AWD cars have three differentials, a box of gears, that distributes the power to the axels of your car. AWD has a front, center, and back differential. This center differential allows the car to split the torque and does so automatically. This allows AWD cars to maintain good traction through a wider variety of conditions than it’s 4WD counterpart.

4WD drives only have two differentials, a front, and back. Therefore on a 4WD car, the power is always split evenly between the front and back wheels – forcing both axels to always rotate at the same speed. Since the axels are always rotating at the same speed, this drivetrain is not able to compensate for as wide of a variety of road surfaces and conditions as an AWD car.