It's really situation dependent. I've been on high crown roads in FWD vehicles where the front end slid sideways and pulled towards the ditch and you'd be stuck where with RWD the rear would pull towards the ditch but you could turn the front wheels, which were not slipping, away from the ditch and you could pull away. I also disagree that understeer is safer and more logical, to me it feels the opposite. In my early days I spun a FWD vehicle by letting off the throttle too quickly and had the back end come around.
You are right
@JRP3, of course, in bringing additional angles and points to the conversation. If the question of FWD vs. RWD (or even vs. AWD) were so simple, we'd just have one of them in all cars. Of course we don't.
My point about understeer being more logical and safer is based on experience and following the discussions and trends around this in winter driving related to non-experienced drivers (young males, unfortunately, a large group of these).
Especially in the old days before ESP, RWDs were the cause of many accidents, probably because oversteer tends to happen when driving straight lines or coming out of corners and when the driver is accelerating and perhaps not quite as alert as when slowing down to a corner, which is the domain of understeer... Understeer happens mostly while cornering when people are slowing down anyway and more alert, given slippery conditions... Oversteer while driving straight is much more dangerous than understeer which usually results in some swerving and slippage only.
Also, understeer is controlled by decelerating, while oversteer is controlled by accelerating and steering towards the opposite way, which makes the latter less intuitive
Plus being able to kick the rear end out with RWD out is more fun
Goes without saying.
For a relative expert, RWD is of course immensely controllable, much more so than FWD.
Indeed - just a personal anecdote Tesla-wise - my Model S P85 was more fun in some ways than the Model X P100D, no wagging the tail there... That said, it is magical how go-kart like the X is... And I definitely felt the RWD danger in the P85. It was much easier to get to misbehave than most cars I've had...
Personally, I'm more of an AWD guy. But even those come in many different varieties.
One more RWD note:
Long time before Tesla, once when joining the motorway I was following some RWD German in front of me in my AWD car. It was winter, snow, below freezing, but otherwise very good weather, sun shining, good visibility, no reason not to drive motorway speeds. The woman driving the car in front of me joined the traffic spiritedly, apparently slamming down the throttle while doing so - and did a perfect 360 degree spin in front of me, ending up in the snowy ditch, heading the right way (and luckily probably not even scratching the car).
Obviously she lost control of the tail while accelerating. An FWD (as in front wheel drive, not falcon wing doors
car might have pushed in that scenario, accelerating to join the motorway traffic, but no way would it have spun. The 50-50 AWD I was driving had no problem either.
