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Concept
Front-wheel drive
Summary
Front-wheel drive (FWD) is a form of engine and transmission layout used in motor vehicles, where the engine drives the front wheels only. Most modern front-wheel drive vehicles feature a transverse engine, rather than the conventional longitudinal engine arrangement generally found in rear-wheel drive and four-wheel drive vehicles.
Car layout#Front-wheel-drive layouts
By far the most common layout for a front-wheel drive car is with the engine and transmission at the front of the car, mounted transversely.
Other layouts of front-wheel drive that have been occasionally produced are a front-engine mounted longitudinally, a mid-engine layout and a rear-engine layout.
Experiments with front-wheel drive cars date to the early days of the automobile. The world's first self-propelled vehicle, Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's 1769/1770 "fardier à vapeur", was a front-wheel driven three-wheeled steam-tractor. It then took at least a century, for the first experiments with mobile internal combustion engines to gain traction.
Sometime between 1895 and 1898 the Austrian brothers and bicycle producers Franz, Heinrich and Karl Gräf, see Gräf & Stift, commissioned the technician Josef Kainz to build a voiturette with a one-cylinder De Dion-Bouton engine fitted in the front of the vehicle, powering the front axle. It is possibly the world's first front-wheel-drive automobile, but it never saw series production, with just one prototype made.
In 1898, Latil, in France, devised a front-wheel-drive system for motorising horse-drawn carts.
In 1899 the inventor Henry Sutton designed and built one of Australia's first cars, called The Sutton Autocar. This car may have been the first front wheel drive car in the world. Henry's car was reported in the English press at the time and featured in the English magazine Autocar which the car was named after. Two prototypes of the Autocar were built and the Austral Otis Company was going to go into business with Henry to manufacture Henry's car but the cost of the car was too prohibitive as it could not compete with the cost of imported cars.
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