The Victoria Napolitano Bookstore THE DRIVING COMPANY WORKBOOK | Page 10

ALL-WHEEL DRIVE (AWD)
A vehicle with AWD has a differential connect-
ing the front and rear drive shafts. This allows the
drive shafts to rotate at different rates of speed.
Because of this center differential, the sum total
RPMs of the front wheels do not have to be the
same as the sum total RPMs of the rear wheels.
This makes it easy to turn and you get the ben-
efit of torque going to all the wheels. But when
you are on very uneven ground off-road and one
wheel loses traction, the differentials will go to
work equalizing the torque and the wheels with
traction will have the same amount of torque
present as the one spinning wheel. AWD is great
for fairly even road surfaces with low traction
but it is not good for the very uneven surfaces
encountered in off-road situations. Most AWD
vehicles do not have low range gears like 4WD
vehicles, but there are a few exceptions such as
some models of the Mercedes Sprinter Van.
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