Well, the only place I see them claiming that is that one press release, so I’m guessing whatever underling wrote it simply made a mistake there.
See, I think that is kind of why Throatwarbler Mangrove and I keep going past each other here. With a center differential, the change in axle rotation speed to go around a corner is necessarily accompanied with a shift in where the torque is going. With the electronic clutch system, it’s not, or at least not as directly so. Throatwarbler seems to think this is an important enough distinction that the two systems are utterly incomparable, but I think that to a typical bad-weather driver it doesn’t really matter. Both systems can send power to both axles while accommodating turns on dry pavement; the only two things the driver really cares about is whether the system can shunt enough power to the rear to move the car if the fronts are spinning (and in virtually all situations 50% is going to be fine), and how much power is sent to the rear under normal driving conditions, which affects how the car handles and how prone the front wheels are to losing traction in the first place.
Ya know, that’s just about the weakest evidence you could provide. Why wouldn’t one set of clutches be able to slip 100% while the other one locks?
I’ve been thinking about why Subaru opted to not use a conventional LSD to distribute power from the CVT. It’s because it’d be a waste to put one in there. LSD’s react to a torque differential mechanically, and are pretty crude. Since the CVT is an electronic transmission, it seems like a no-brainer to eliminate the weight and have the clutches being electronically controlled. Also, since the output and input shafts are parallel, and connected via a chain, there doesn’t seem to be a loss from changing the direction of power. I’m not a fan of CVTs in general, but that’s a pretty nifty transmission.
Winches don’t need to be operated from the drivers seat. Few are. There is a wired control that plugs in to the winch that has the controls. Anyway, you want to be out of the vehicle so that you can closely watch the progress (or lack of).
Because it doesn’t have a clutch for the front axle. The most it can do is lock the two axles together, sending 50% to the rear, but under no circumstance can it send more power to the rear than the front. (Notice that on those videos where they put three wheels of the car on rollers and have it drive off, they one wheel with traction is always on the front. Not that the car wouldn’t get off the rollers if it were a rear wheel, but in order to send power to that one rear wheel, it’d also have to send power to the front and so the front wheels would also be spinning.)
It might be that the press release writer meant that the system can electronically shift 100% of the available power from axle to axle or something like that. Or maybe they were just mixed up.
Subaru has been touting the ability of the system to control power split electronically with the whole “proactive AWD” thing where it monitors the same sensors as the VSC system and tries to predict the need to shift power ahead of time. However, I’m pretty sure the major reason to use it instead of a viscous coupling is that it’s cheap. The manual still uses the VC because the clutch system would need a separate hydraulic system, but on the automatic it can use the same one as the transmission.