Anecdotally, I grew up in the Northeast in the era of rear wheel drive cars and one thing you almost never see nowadays is cars stuck in the snow. I don’t know if it was the rear wheel drive or if tires just sucked back in the 70’s, but you’d spend half the winter pushing cars while the rear wheels spun madly. Note that I’m not implying that FWD and AWD cars don’t fly off the highways when people drive like idiots in the snow, but they will generally drive in a few inches of snow or slush where the RWD cars of the 70’s would be helpless.
I grew up driving in the northeast too, in the 1970s, and I saw this often. I experienced it too. It is because the rear wheels had very little weight over them (the engine being in front). The rear wheels spun madly. People used to put weights in the rear trunk, to increase friction to the rear wheels.
Vehicle tech has gotten more sophisticated in that time, but tire technology has also improved quite a bit. Compared to modern rubber, tires in the 70s did suck, be it in dry, wet or icy weather.
Honestly, it’s mostly the driver, anyway. The original rally cars were RWD, so they’ve long proven capable in less favorable weather, but most state driving programs do just enough to get people on the roads, and at least in my state, they don’t regularly check tires for safety, outside of an initial inspection.
I like the feeling of being pushed over being pulled.
I used to have a rear wheel drive 87 Cadillac Fleetwood and a front wheel drive 67 Oldsmobile Toronado. Both were heavy cars with heavy engines. The oversteer of the Caddy was fun when pushing it, but the lack of weight on the back end over the drive wheels sucked in the winter. The understeer of the Toronado was intimidating when pushing it, and the torque-steer was annoying because when accelerating during a turn, turning in one direction was noticeably different that turning the other direction, however, the weight over the drive wheels in the front made winter driving easy, for I didn’t have to worry about spinning out from the back end sliding out.
Waaay back when I was in high school, there was a big snow storm that started in the middle of the day and school was let out. It was a mess.
Everybody still had rear wheel drive cars back then. The only person able to drive out of the parking lot was a friend of mine with a VW Beetle. He shuttled his friends home. Problem was, not many could fit in it, of course.
Rear wheel drive is okay if you have the engine in the rear.
(I also remember walking up the hill to school when the hill was icy. Lots of examples of the sideways rear spinning thing.)
Waaay back before the Eisenhower tunnel, my aunt, her friend, and her friend’s baby (in a basket in the Beetle’s storage area below the rear window), slid off Loveland Pass in a winter storm and were caught in a steel net. Minimal damage, and didn’t even wake the baby.
She lived in Denver and was an avid skier who drove only Beetles for decades to get to the slopes with no complaints about their ability to handle winter driving other than that is was poorly heated and the windshield often fogged over.
Since it’s been asked above:
Rear wheel drive cars are better in the snow nowadays (e.g., pulling away from a stop) because of incredible and amazing leaps in tire technology, particularly with tire compounds, especially the addition of silica and advanced siping in the tread pattern.
They also benefit in some cases from traction control, which will limit power output to the wheel(s) and stop the driver from overpowering the drive wheel(s).
More RWD cars today also have the engine further back in the chassis (but still in front), which moves more weight to the rear wheels.
The above listed reasons are probably in order of importance, too, as to why RWD cars are better in snow nowadays.
More interior room was mentioned as an advantage of FWD, and I’ll add rear engine, RWD. This feature was touted in Corvairs and early Toronados and Eldorados. Now, what do the manufacturers do? They put huge consoles in the middle of the car that take up more interior room than the old transmission tunnels did.
Waaay back when I joined the Marines, I bought my first car, a 1979 Fiat X1/9. It was a tiny car. TINY. Smaller than a Beetle. But it was mid-engined and RWD, so the engine weight was above the drive wheels. In dry weather it handled fantastically, like a slot car on rails. In the snow and ice, it was also great - a nice, unexpected surprise for my little driving experience.
In April 1983 my brother and I drove cross-country from San Francisco to our hometown in Upstate New York. Unfortunately, a late winter storm decided to follow us eastward across the entire country. We had snow starting in Donner Pass (California Sierras), and it was really bad in Denver, in Colorado on 80, 25, 70 and 24, Nebraska (I-80 was ice covered), Chicago and western New York state.
Many SUVs with 4WD, Jeeps and cars and trucks were wiped out off of the roads, but that little Fiat with its engine above the drive wheels shod with normal summer street tires just kept plugging along. It was the first and only time I had that car in the snow. It was a great car, very dependable (yes!), and after 90,000 solid miles I sold it for a family car.
Its snow and ice performance was simply amazing. When we got to our hometown a family friend and long-time Saab driver told us we did so well because the weight was over the drive wheels. That car saved our asses on that winter trip.
Another thing in addition to traction control is that back in the bad old days when family sedans and economy cars were RWD they all had open differentials, whereas these days since RWD cars are all at least somewhat performance-oriented, most of them come with some sort of limited-slip rear end, which helps quite a lot.
This oversimplifies things a little, but the idea that FWD is better/safer is an outdated notion. In the days before traction control, ABS and improved tire technology wet and snowy conditions were tough for drivers in RWD cars, so FWD was the lesser of 2 evils.
Today, FWD cars are far less balanced, handle worse, are more expensive to repair/maintain than RWD cars and perform much, much worse in premium/sport models. For some economy and family sedans FWD is still a nice option because it’s lighter, and allows companies to skimp on the traction control and tires to hit a price point. FWD because it’s lighter usually delivers better fuel economy.