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By Karla Sanchez - February 4, 2015
Ford's turning up the heat when it comes to its performance vehicles, bringing us the Ford GT, Shelby GT350R, and the F-150 Raptor. But it's not done with the surprises just yet, as a new report from Autocar reveals the new Focus RS's all-wheel drive system will roll out onto other future vehicles.
The new Focus RS revealed just yesterday boasts a new setup called All-Wheel Drive with Dynamic Torque Vectoring Control. The system is perhaps one of the most significant mechanical upgrades the Focus RS has received over the past two generations, considering it's the first time the model has been driven by all four wheels. The all-wheel-drive system uses twin electronically controlled clutch packs on each side of the rear drive unit to manage the front-rear split as well as side-to-side torque vectoring on the rear axle. Vehicle sensor inputs including steering wheel angle, lateral acceleration, yaw, and speed are monitored 100 times per second to determine where to allocate power. The system can reportedly send up to 70 percent of torque to the rear axle and up to 100 percent of the rear torque to either wheel.
Ford boasts that this system helps virtually eliminate understeer in the Focus RS, but that won't be the only model to benefit from it. “We’ve done the hard part in developing it to production,” Tyrone Johnson, RS engineering manager, told Autocar. “It would be fair to suggest that we’ll be looking to use the technology in other ways in the future, having done that.”
That's all the engineer had to say, as he remained tightlipped about which other Ford performance vehicles would feature the all-wheel-drive system. While this is good news for Ford enthusiasts, we could only imagine how much of a blow it is to rivals such as the Subaru WRX STI and the Volkswagen Golf R.
Ford Performance Vehicles to Feature New Focus RS AWD System
