Today I was planning to write totally something else but when I consider the weather today in UK, I decided to publish these videos. There are four luxury vehicles placed in same position for snow climbing test. The test was conducted in Russian and I have no idea what they are saying but I can understand, all vehicles have their winter tyres on. The first one is Mercedes-Benz S500 4MATIC, second one BMW 750 xDrive, third one is ab old Audi A8 4,2 Quattro and the last one is Porsche Panamera. I don’t know the exactly model of Panamera but I did not hear any turbo sound, so it could be 4S!
All these vehicles have four-wheel drive systems but each of them have different technologies. Mercedes calls it 4MATIC, Audi calls is Quattro, BMW calls it xDrive and Porsche just names it as “4”. Basically their four-wheels have power from the engine but the distribution and functionality is totally different in each car. Mercedes 4MATIC: Front %45, Rear %55
BMW xDrive: Front %40, Rear %60
Audi Quattro: Front %40, Rear %60
Porsche: Constantly changing, no pre-determined splitExplanation; power from the engine goes to forty percentage to front wheels and fifty five percentage to rear wheels in Mercedes. But the electronic systems ASR, ESP constantly changing the power between wheels to increase traction. However, all these vehicles are near more than two-tonnes, so don’t expect a great performance !
In my opinion; all these cars are showing great performance. Mainly they are not designed for this kind terrain, they have huge wide tyres which reduces the pressure on snow and they are very heavy.