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If Cyber, Silverado, Hummer all have 4-wheel steering, I wonder how long Lightning and R1T hold out. Again, it may not be strictly necessary, but it would make tank turn easier if you could tilt both front wheels toward the grill and both back wheels toward the hitch.
Having 1, 2 or 4 motors doesn’t really make it any easier to incorporate 4-wheel steering (actually having to make axles both steer and drive makes it harder if anything). The 4 motors could make for some improved torque-vectoring relatively easy. Full fledged 4WS systems haven’t sold particularly well although folks with the Chevy pickups liked them, you almost never saw one spec’s with it.Four-wheel steering seems like a gimme for an electric vehicle with a motor on each wheel. I’m surprised Rivians weren’t designed with it from the start, especially considering how visionary they have been about so many aspects of the vehicle.
Do you think 4-wheel steering is coming any time soon? Is it a challenging engineering problem? How much might it add to the cost of the vehicle? Is it necessary or just a gimmick on a vehicle like the R1’s where turn radius seems already pretty good?
It will add more expense, that's an obvious conclusion - it's requires more physical components, alignment mechanism, etc.
Given it’s a larger vehicle, I’d think this would be most handy at low speeds to aid with parking. I’d expect torque vectoring could aid in that regard, though it seems consistency could be a problem. As a driver, I don’t really want to be guessing what my turn angle is going to be based on a combination of how much I turn the wheel and my speed. Perhaps this could be part of some sort of “smart” parking functionality, specifically if we get to a point with fully autonomous driving. A computer could probably center up a tight spot better than any human could.
It’d be pretty easy, with 4 motors, to turn the rear wheels in opposite directions, or vary the speed of inner and outer rear wheels slightly to tighten up turning.
The 200-series Land Cruiser / LX570 have had that for years. I'm really hoping Rivian at least gives us that much though. IIRC, they are calling that feature a K-turn, but haven't released it yet.
