2020 Honda CR-V Hybrid vs. Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Slip Traction Test: One Is Clearly Better

Check out our new weekly PODCAST — TFL Talkin’ Cars! ( )

Hey guys tommy here with the fastlane car and boy do i have a fun video for you today we have two extremely popular crossovers the toyota rav4 hybrid and the honda crv hybrid and we’re going to find out which one has a better all-wheel drive system by putting them through the tfl slip test the all-wheel drive system in the crv hybrid is somewhat traditional and

I say traditional and air quotes because nothing about the crv hybrid is traditional there’s no conventional transmission it’s all actually very complex stuff what is pretty similar to your typical crossover is the operation of the all-wheel drive system in that there is a prop shaft that delivers the power in the torque from the hybrid system down the middle

Of the vehicle to the rear end a physical connection it works like your standard all-wheel drive system-ish the rav4 all-wheel drive system is completely different in the front you’ve got your four-cylinder engine you’ve got your electric motor that powers the front wheels and then you’ve got nothing down here in the middle there’s no prop shaft connecting the

Front end to the rear end instead they give you an additional motor in the rear whose entire job is to spin up the rear wheels so this is a very different system than the old-school drive shaft in that honda so in the slip test what we do is we get the vehicle stuck on purpose and see if they can get themselves unstuck so our first test is going to be the front

Wheel slip test we’re going to back the vehicle onto our rollers with both front wheels stuck in this contraption and then the car is going to have to pull itself out using just the rear axle now for this video i’ve actually removed another set of rollers here in the middle just to make this pit a little deeper to challenge these vehicles to the extreme so i

Positioned some yellow tape on the tires so you can see exactly what’s spinning and how fast and i’m going to back into the rollers come on all right just like that and then neutral let the vehicle settle and then into drive this is going to be normal mode just as you would drive it every day let’s see what happens foot off the brake and accelerate all right so

That took us off the rollers quickly and easily i think that was a good result all right same thing in the rav4 now i’ve got this vehicle in normal mode just like i did in the uh honda okay the vehicle is settled foot off the brake and accelerate all right so that was a little bit more tricky than what we found in the uh in the honda let’s try it one more

Time all right in a drive put off the brake so what you notice there is it takes more throttle before the rear end will actually kick in and get you unstuck when the front wheels are in the rollers i found this to be pretty typical with these toyota all-wheel drive systems on their hybrids because the rear electric motors are a lot less powerful than the

Combined front end horsepower and torque all right the diagonal slip test this is going to be the front left completely stuck and the rear right let’s see how the honda deals with this awkward situation which is actually a pretty common situation anytime you go off-road or even in the snow so i’m going to go into neutral let it settle into the rollers into

Drive okay foot off the brake and accelerating come on figure it out figure it out all right that’s not working super well let me try turning my traction control off all right so with traction control off and a little bit more throttle we were able to get out but it did take some work all right so diagonal slip test on the rav4 this is front left rear right

Stuck just like the honda now the reason i’m using normal mode is because even though this does have a trail mode the honda doesn’t and that really wouldn’t be fair but we may try it at the end when we get this thing really stuck so still in normal mode in a drive traction control on a little bit of throttle it’s trying all right we’re definitely stuck that

Does not feel like it’s going to go anywhere so what should i do well let me try engaging well let me try turning traction control off like i did in the honda let’s see if that gets us unstuck are we ready no that’s just causing the rollers to smoke all right let’s try trail mode so trail mode is going to be the most aggressive programming for the audio drive

System in three two one all right so we did get unstuck in trail mode but that definitely struggled more than the honda this is our three wheel flip test and we’re gonna start out with the honda crv so basically both rear wheels completely stuck the front right wheel completely stuck only the front left wheel has traction this is an extreme test it’s also

Slightly uphill so it’s back into the rollers all right in a neutral normal mode traction control on and go oh not bad at all we were able to get out of the three wheeled slip test it did take some throttle though all right here we go on the three wheeled slip test so both rear wheels and the right front are going to be stuck which means only the left

Front is traction starting out in normal mode all right into drive in three two one accelerate so let’s try trail mode into trail mode in three two one accelerate man we are really stuck let me try it one more time go yeah so even in trail mode it looks like we are really stuck i’ll try doing trail mode traction control off and if that doesn’t work we’ll

Just back her down accelerating that has made little to no difference we made it down all right so not as good as i wanted but um at least we didn’t get stuck going downhill now i thought for sure that the rav4 would outperform the honda because the rav4 has a special drive mode called trail mode for off-road use the honda just does not have a mode like

That whatsoever but i was incorrect with my initial assumption because i think it’s pretty clear that the honda one this all-wheel drive shootout now there’s a couple reasons this could be the rav4 here has that rear electric motor that develops 54 horsepower and 89 pound-feet of torque that should be plenty of power to get this thing unstuck in your typical

Situations but on an extreme test it didn’t feel like it kicked in quite as hard as the honda’s more traditional all-wheel drive system and the brakes did not grab the spinning wheels nearly as well as the honda to get you unstuck all in all i think that the honda performed better today head over to tfl car and tfiltruck.com because we have a lot more of these

Shootouts coming up and i hope you enjoy them this week on the tfl studios we have a lot of cool car and truck content coming up for you on tfl truck channel we have a cool offroad video with a hummer h2 and of course truck madness coming up in may then on tfl offroad steven is cooking up an amazing video featuring the kawasaki krx followed by tfl classics where

You will see the latest at home edition featuring a really nice mercedes on tfl car we have this feature which is loveland trials with a brand new honda crv and a toyota rav4 hybrids the combined epa rating on the crv is 38 the combined epa rating and the toyota is 40. now in this video we’re going to find out which one of the two is going to get the best fuel

Economy we’re also going to review them and at the end we’re going to say which one we should buy that’s uh that’s quite the discrepancy we have there yeah yeah so well there you have it tommy so um wow yeah and of course tfl now channel is where you’ll find all the latest and greatest news from the automotive world check it out

Transcribed from video
2020 Honda CR-V Hybrid vs. Toyota RAV4 Hybrid Slip Traction Test: One Is Clearly Better! By The Fast Lane Car