>>1658039But how often is 2 wheel drive actually useful?
The few rare times that I lost traction on an incline, it's almost always so steep that there's almost no weight on my front wheel anyway.
Also, when going slow uphill and having to choose your path carefully on bad terrain you have to make a lot of turns. This means that your front wheel covers more distance than your back wheel. This means that your front wheel gets might not have very good traction anymore.
On cars you have a differential for that, but a differential gives the same traction force to both wheels, where the front wheel gets too much force and the backwheel too little (with normal weight distributions).
I would say that this is a gimmick.
But when I'm on bad roads I usually carry a full set of front+back bags, which makes that traction is mostly fine. Mountainbikes might be different.
