mercedes benz a class is front wheel drive or rear wheel drive.
mercedes benz a class is front wheel drive or rear wheel drive.
mercedes benz a class front or rear wheel drive?
front wheel drive
light van designs placing the driver and the engine together at the front of a relatively flat fronted cab had been pioneered in france by citroën in 1939 with a design that incorporated front wheel drive. eleven years and one world war later volkswagen had launched a flat fronted rear wheel drive light van with the engine at the back. by placing the engine at the same end of the vehicle as the driving wheels, both the citroen and volkswagen approaches avoided having to locate a drive shaft along the length of the load area. but the front-wheel drive solution required the front wheels to be attached using a type of universal joint that was difficult to mass-produce at an acceptable cost without sacrificing strength, while with the rear engined volkswagen design it was difficult to load goods over the engine from the back of the vehicle. in 1955 mercedes-benz had addressed the competing challenges with the l319 which combined a driving position (shared with the engine) right at the front with rear wheel drive, using a driveshaft lifted from a passenger car design. with this design the drive shaft ran not through the load deck but below it. that necessitated a far higher load deck than on the volkswagen van or the comparable contemporary citroën design, and the entire structure of the mercedes-benz light van was taller than the volkswagen. it was also significantly wider which meant that the driver's cabin, with an engine in the middle of it, was more specious than on the british light vans of the period. with the b 611 borgward followed the mercedes-benz lay-out. the engine was at the front and the driving wheels were at the back. the load-floor was high enough to accommodate the drive shaft that connected them. with a width of the borgward van was actually slightly wider than the wide mercedes equivalent. both of them were much wider than the volkswagen van which by the late 1950s had grown to a width of .
borgward b 611
in all its post volkswagen-era models, audi has firmly refused to adopt the traditional rear-wheel drive layout favored by its two archrivals mercedes-benz and bmw, favoring either front-wheel drive or all-wheel drive. the majority of audi's lineup in the united states features all-wheel drive standard on most of its expensive vehicles (only the entry-level trims of the a4 and a6 are available with front-wheel drive), in contrast to mercedes-benz and bmw whose lineup treats all-wheel drive as an option. bmw did not offer all-wheel drive on its v8-powered cars (as opposed to crossover suvs) until the 2010 bmw 7 series and 2011 bmw 5 series, while the audi a8 has had all-wheel drive available/standard since the 1990s. regarding high-performance variants, audi s and rs models have always had all-wheel drive, unlike their direct rivals from bmw m and mercedes-amg whose cars are rear-wheel drive only (although their performance crossover suvs are all-wheel drive).
audi