Dual-motor EVs have 4WD but can’t send all that power to the rear, which makes you approach them differently
One of the joys of doing the Autocar road test, whether it’s a performance car or something prosaic, is getting to use Horiba MIRA’s handling circuits.
The earnest, serious-consumer-journalist justification for slinging family crossovers around a test track is that doing so might unearth undercooked aspects of their stability control systems or their behaviour in an emergency avoidance scenario. But modern cars are pretty sophisticated in that respect. At worst, some ESC systems can feel a bit heavy-handed, but they still tend to do the job safely.
No, if we’re honest, it’s simply interesting to see what cars do when they’re pushed beyond what’s strictly acceptable or safe on the road, largely because there are clearly differences in how much thought and development work the manufacturers put into this. And electric cars are often the most interesting of all, because they rewrite certain rules about controls and dynamics.
The first is the level of switchability of the TCS and ECS systems. Many car makers don’t let you turn any of it off – and, given the tenuous real-world relevance of doing so and the potential for ditch-finding, it’s hard to blame them. Others, like Hyundai and Kia, are entertainingly laissez-faire. Others still are weird about it. On the MG 4, it feels like everything is fully off until you’re mid-drift and the car goes into limp mode for 20 seconds, which is less than helpful.
Then there’s the accelerator calibration. Ever since throttle cables joined the graveyard of obsolete automotive technology, the right pedal has been a torque request device rather than a direct control of something in the engine. The car’s digital brain decides how much it will give you, and that may or may not be proportional to how far you have pressed the pedal.
Many EVs from the Geely group have a weird delay to their response, which in the Smart #1 can manifest as something that feels like a surprise clutch kick. Those are words that don’t belong together. Others, though, do give you instant and very fine control.
Electric motors have also changed how we need to think about four-wheel drive. They can react much faster than any constellation of differentials and clutch packs in a conventional 4WD system ever could, but they have their limitations. The BMW iX3 may have more torque in total than the petrol-engined BMW M340i xDrive (476lb ft versus 369lb ft), but it distributes it very differently. The M340i will send all of that 369lb ft to its rear wheels until the electronics reckon the front axle should pull its weight, whereas the iX3 can send a maximum of only 321lb ft to the rear axle, because that’s all the rear motor has.
As a result, whereas the M340i will fundamentally behave like a rear-wheel-drive car, the iX3 arguably feels more like a classic hot Subaru with a centre differential. If you approach a corner neatly (brake in a straight line, turn, apply power), the M340i will oversteer on exit, whereas the iX3 will grip and go.
But, like an Impreza, the iX3 responds well to rally driver thinking. While its weight is distributed quite evenly, there is an awful lot of it, so if you turn in aggressively on the brakes, it makes itself known as it starts to push the back end out of line. Pick up the throttle and the iX3 will oblige with plenty of oversteer, the driven front axle’s influence and nicely linear and immediate accelerator response making the whole thing beautifully controllable.
When set up well, with plenty of torque, predictable accelerator response and switchable systems, EVs actually make for excellent drift cars, if only tantalisingly briefly. The cruel irony is that all that weight and torque that are helpful for slinging the car sideways and keeping it there also chew up tyres when you push beyond the limit.
It feels like we’re only at the start of what can be done with EV dynamics, below and over the limit – but they can’t get lighter soon enough.
