Torque vectoring: Taking on the arctic with GKN

You can almost sense the impending accident in the stillness of the Arctic air. Two-and-a-half tonnes of Volvo XC90 is bearing down on a perilous 90-degree corner, covered in sheet ice. The surface has a light dusting of snow and glassy blue patches where it has been scraped bare.

And yet, somehow, the inevitable crunch never comes. Instead, the nose of the car tucks obediently into the bend and the driver floors the throttle to ride out a long, lurid slide.

It soon becomes apparent that he’s doing it on purpose. Not very relevant to everyday driving you might argue, but the car in question is one of GKN Driveline’s fleet of technology demonstrators. And the important thing here is that it’s bending physics in a way that a vehicle of this size simply shouldn’t be able to do.

As with the production Volvo XC90 T8, on which this prototype is based, the combustion engine powers the front wheels alone, with drive to the rear coming from an electric motor. The key difference here is that the standard rear drive unit has been replaced by a GKN eTwinster system, which uses a pair of active clutch packs to distribute the torque in place of a differential.