In the 1950s and 1960s, the majority of vehicles sold in the United States employed rear-wheel drive. Four-wheel drive vehicles existed, but they were just a tiny fraction of the cars on the road. They were heavy, clumsy, and rode like tanks. I recall that in the 1960s when I learned to drive, there were very few vehicles available with four-wheel or front-wheel drive. Getting up and down our hilly Vermont terrain covered in snow in a rear-wheel drive car or truck required winter tires with deep, aggressive tread. Only a handful of people had four-wheel drive. Saab made front-wheel drive cars in the 1960s. Citroen imported front-wheel drive cars as well, but they were as scarce as a hen’s teeth. Volkswagen’s rear-wheel drive Beetle was good in snow because the rear-mounted engine’s weight was over the drive wheels.
With good snow tires and maybe some extra weight over the drive wheels we got around in snow with very few issues. My Grandfather owned the top of Bald Mountain in Plymouth and Bridgewater back then, and he ran a Willys flat-fender Jeep with a Sears Roebuck aluminum cab. He still had to put chains on the tires to get up Town Line Road because that road was not plowed in winter. My Uncle Bill Gorsky in Springfield had one of those four-wheel drive Jeep wagons back then, and he would regularly go up to the family camp in Plymouth during winter. The rest of us had to make do with our rear-wheel drive vehicles as best we could.
I distinctly remember my Boy Scout leader Carlo Zezza had a new 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado when we attended Scout Camp in Plymouth that year. I recall that Mr. Z was enamored with his new-fangled General Motors front-wheel drive Olds. He needed that car to get up to his radio station, WCFR, off Craigue Hill Road in Springfield in inclement weather. His home on a back road in Chester was also pretty sketchy in winter back in the day. Within just a few years after the Toronado came out, there was a huge front-wheel-drive revolution among auto manufacturers.
The Toronado wasn’t the first front-wheel drive car built in America, but it was the first sold by a major American manufacturer, and that in itself made it revolutionary. In the 1930s Cord produced a front-driver, but the constant velocity joints that enabled the drive system to drive and steer at the same time were unreliable. Nowadays, CV joints are far more reliable.
My first front-wheel drive car was a Plymouth Champ, a sub-compact built for Chrysler in Japan by Mitsubishi. It was a great little car that felt like you were strapping it on when you got in to drive it. The Champ handled great, and I remember driving it all day at 90 miles per hour (not kilometers per hour) from New Brunswick to Quebec City. I still don’t know how I got away with that. The Champ was nearly totaled in a snowstorm when a driver pulled a u-turn in front of me on Route 12 in Charlestown, N.H. After it was repaired, I traded it for a front-drive VW Rabbit diesel.
Since those days in the early 1980s, I have owned many front-wheel drive automobiles. While they did better in snow than rear-wheel drive cars, they pale compared to the all-weather ability of today’s all-wheel and four-wheel drive vehicles. Where I live we need every wheel on the car to be a drive wheel in a snowstorm, or we don’t make our hill. We currently have four rear-wheel drive vehicles and three all-wheel or four-wheel drive vehicles. The rear-wheel drives all stay in storage each winter. We’ve come a long way since the 1950s with useful drive options, making travel safer and more accessible in winter weather.
We take these systems for granted, but I am so grateful for them. All-wheel-drive technology has made these vehicles far more economical to drive than ever before, and the complexity of those systems is greatly enhanced by electronics, regardless of how much we are skeptical about their reliability. They get better with each passing year. A lightweight uni-body all-wheel-drive vehicle in 2025 makes a 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado look like a gas-guzzling tank. However, when GM put it all upfront, it opened the new drive system floodgates and changed our world.