German Car Zone

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Check out this video from a German news channel. Even if you don't understand German, it's not hard to make out the just of it. Several all-wheel drive cars are compared, testing to see how high up a ski slope they can climb. The allroad quattro goes last, surpassing cars such as the BMW X5, BMW 330xi, Volvo XC70, Lexus GS and more. The Torsen-based allroad goes last and bests them all.


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this is an old video and I already seen it
but its a cool vid...

This is few years old.

old X5 so i'm guessing old X-drive.
there was a test very recently where the new X-drive system beat all, including quattro, it was posted on this board

You mean this test?

http://www.germancarzone.com/showthread.php?t=2850 (A4 2.0T quattro beats 6 rivals in Road&Track AWD Sedan Comparo.)

Whatever. BMW (thankfullY!) has no car in this segment, and we all knew Audi would beat out the Volvo.

i dont think that test was in the snow though.....thats were it really counts.

i do believe quattro is superior, but there were two things i find wrong about this experiment.

1. they all ran different tires. this makes a huge difference in the snow. this is probably the reason the lexus did so poorly. its stock tires are probably designed for road comfort and quietness.

2. the cars going later had a slightly different surface than the cars that went first. the first few cars packed down the snow. so even though the course was the same for all the cars, the surface conditions weren't.

A swedish carmag drove 5er against other AWD cars on winterroads and the 5er won. Another swedish carmag drove 3er AWD and was suprised how good it was. BMw xDrive is much better than before.

Xdrive in this test might be older version but Allroad doesn't use the latest quattro version also. Permanent AWD (quattro) will always be better than conditional AWD (xDrive/4Matic).