Quote:
Originally Posted by Soterios
First I had to giggle at that first line. That's just marketing hype. SAWD is just a term Subaru made up for their own cars.
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Not quite as subaru states that the engine lies symetrical on the same axes as the driveline.
With bmw this is not 100% the case, for at least their 4 and 6cyl engines.
Both those engines are slant engines at bmw and thus lean to 1 side to reduce overall height.
Also with bmw's x drive the front cv shafts are of different lenght (differs pretty much), and with subaru I think they're of equal length.
If any, subaru's sawd is mostly comparable to audi's quattro, with also having the engine completely in front of the front axle.
Only with subary thats a very low gravety engine (because 4cyl boxer) and a very short engine (because 4cyl boxer).
For audi that's never the case (can you imagine, a straight up standing inline 5 compared to the low slung short 4cyl boxer), thats why the subaru implementation is imho way better than audi's implementation and that for this kind of setup only 2 engines really are suited: a 4 cyl boxer and a wankel engine. The Wankel of course you'd have to be a die hard fan of to accept all of its............issues :+
Of course in the end there's more to it like what kind of diffs they use and how it all functions, but on those matters both companies use lots of variations.
BTW the above is written by someone who neither has subaru loyalty (never owned one) nor audi loyalty (never owned one) nor bmw loyalty (only owned one that I still have).
I just like to analyze technical implementations of car manufacturers
