So does thing have proper AWD or that slip and grip silliness??
it's slip n' grip, but there's more grip than slip - very quick to shift power to the wheels with traction or simply divide the torque equally. our side street is essentially a sheet of ice, so the AWD and Dunlop winters have been getting a through 'testing'. AWD will get the vehicle moving before traction control even peeps, so i've never had to bother turning it off.
I would not hesitate to recommend the SFXL or the Dunlops for winter weather duty, although i believe the Dunlops are fairly pricey. Still, this kind of AWD is meant for poor weather and cottage trails, none of the Jeep-y climb up a cliff stuff you're into.
The Santa Fe uses a pretty advanced setup for its AWD system. The system is capable of collecting data from the engine, steering, and braking systems in order to analyze road conditions and distribute torque between the front and rear axles in the most effective way possible. With the data pulled from these sensors, the system adjusts lock-up of the rear coupling to actuate the rear differential and regulate exactly how much power is transferred to the back.
One of the reasons the system is able to respond so quickly is that it uses an electro-hydraulic clutch as opposed to a magnetic variant. Basically, the rear coupling that engages the rear differential when needed is actuated by an electronically-controlled hydraulic clutch. When the vehicle is turned on, the system immediately builds hydraulic pressure in the coupling to bring the clutch as close as possible to its bite point. Note that this isn’t pre-loading, because no there’s no parasitic power loss and the clutch isn’t actually biting. That said, because the system is “primed”, when the control unit senses the need for torque distribution to the back, it can activate the rear differential extremely quickly. The degree to which power is shifted back is dictated by the data collected from the other systems I noted above.
Of course, the system can also be manually locked in a 50/50 split at low speeds for maximum traction.
