Selling people on the necessity of AWD is – arguably – the greatest sales job of the past 40 years.

Go back to then and AWD was something only a couple of brands (Audi and Subaru, chiefly) offered and that gave them something to sell that others didn’t have to sell. That was a fine thing for all concerned. People who needed or just wanted AWD could buy it – and those who didn’t had other choices.

Now, there’s a lot less choice – because AWD has become almost as standard as ashtrays were when AWD was a mostly Subaru-Audi thing. Why? Because people were sold on it. Just as they have been sold on not smoking, by the way. As opposed to simply buying AWD because they wanted it or felt they needed to have it. There’s a distinction there that’s worth digging into a little.

Advertising is the science of selling people things they don’t really need by convincing them that they do need it. It is a science that, when used deftly, works like an On/Off switch; see that bit about smoking and how almost everyone used to and now almost no one does (and ashtrays in cars have become as rare as they once were ubiquitous).

The science of selling was pioneered by people such as Edward Bernays, who was the first to articulate the doctrine in scientific terms mor than a century ago. He sussed out people’s emotions; the feelings that would prompt them to feel the need to buy something – and then used people’s feelings to manipulate them into believing they had to buy whatever it was that was being sold. Like war, for instance. Bernays was involved in selling that when he worked as a member of the Committee on Public Information to (his words) “engineer consent.” Put another way, to create a desire for something that people didn’t know they needed. 

Arguably, AWD is sold this way. The perception that it is a near-necessity is sold this way. This is done by suggesting that a vehicle without AWD is not safe. That it is risky to drive a vehicle that does not have AWD. This has proved extremely effective in our time because many people have been trained to dread risk and also to believe there is more risk than there actually is. It was easy to sell most people on the need to wear a “mask” because it made them feel safe. Many were in a state of near-hysteria and thus highly suggestible. Bernays  – who was related to the founder of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud – understood the workings of this and so did his students, generations down the line.

So, the other car companies saw the success Audi and Subaru were having selling AWD and began to try selling it themselves. Naturally, they did so by implying that AWD is something of a necessity. That you’ll get stuck when it snows if your car does not have AWD. Maybe you will. But not necessarily. A front-wheel-drive car (traction avant or traction up front was the term used originally, by Citroen, about 100 years ago) when this layout  with a set of good snow tires can be better in the snow than an AWD car with (and this is common) “sport” tires. The tires you have matter at least as much as which wheels are turning. So also how low your car sits. Many AWD cars don’t have a lot of ground clearance, though some (Subarus) have more than most other vehicles aside from 4WD trucks.

The take-home point is that if your AWD equipped car is low and rides up on the snow, all four wheels will spin but you won’t go.

That is why the old VW Beetle was so good in the snow, by the way – and it was rear-wheel-drive. It had pizza pie-plate tall and skinny tires that cut through the snow, down to the road where the traction is.

The neat thing about snow tires is you don’t have to drag them around with you during the summer, when there is plenty of traction. If you buy a set for the winter and only use them during the winter, they’ll probably last several winters. With AWD, you’re lugging around the extra weight all the time and most of the time you don’t really need it.  AWD usually adds more to the cost of the vehicle than a set of snow tires – and snow tires don’t require maintenance or repair (excepting flats).

You may not even need snow tires – unless you live in an area that has significant snow on the ground for weeks or months at a time. If it’s just a few days out of the year – maybe, if it actually does snow – a set of all-season tires combined with FWD will usually get you to where you need to go and back again.

Knowing how to drive also helps – but since that’s free, it’s not something they try to sell you.

. . .

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