Talk:Rear-engine, front-wheel-drive layout

Rover Group hasn't been a thing for more than ten years now, Wikipatent seems to have died, and the listed GB patent number comes up as "invalid" with any service I've tried to search for it with, including the main gov.uk site. Think we need to do something about that section, therefore, though I'm not entirely sure what at the moment ... how do we even approach such edits other than completely wiping out the offending paragraphs? I'm sure there was probably something useful there at one point, but any online evidence of it has vanished, making updating or re-citing it difficult to impossible. 146.199.0.170 (talk) 19:27, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

Edit: damn, it's been nearly 18 years since the Rover Group existed - their own Wiki article shows it was finally broken up and sold to Tata JLR, and MG in 2000 (and MG didn't really last as a contiguous-from-Rover going concern that far into the noughties; the current incarnation is actually a Chinese company that just bought the rights to the name and logo). That's before Wikipedia even started. How have we got such stale information (suggesting Rover was actively researching RF drivetrains) being included in the wiki, and where did it come from? Did the mentioned "inventor-engineer" write it in himself as a vanity edit? When exactly was that research conducted, and was it canned even before BMW got their hands on the company? 146.199.0.170 (talk) 19:39, 7 November 2018 (UTC)


 * He was named on several patents held by Rover. https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Michael+Basnett Andy Dingley (talk) 19:41, 7 November 2018 (UTC)


 * That's nice to know, I guess, but that's pretty much the lowest content reply to my questions you could possibly have made, and I think we could probably have guessed that anyway, as the responsible party usually does get a mention on patents. In the meantime, I've found a working link for the patent and a little bit of metadata courtesy of Jalopnik, which I'm going to use to repair the article. FWIW, the patent application was made more than nineteen years ago, and appears to have been purely exploratory (verging on patent trolling, in case someone else ever tried to make a car using the format), so any suggestion that it's "interest for the future" or whatever is extremely fragile. 146.199.0.170 (talk) 19:50, 7 November 2018 (UTC)


 * Done and done. Hopefully I haven't ruined it too badly. Also, damn ... checked the edit history, and the paragraphs in question have been in place in this article, untouched, since it was first created almost exactly ten years ago :-o (...thing is, even then, the information was nine years stale...) 146.199.0.170 (talk) 20:38, 7 November 2018 (UTC)

A list of RF drive layout vehicles
A list of such vehicles should be compiled. RhapsodyWIK (talk) 16:26, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

Dymaxion car
How could it possibly turn on its base if the rear wheel was unpowered? Turning the rear wheel a full 90 degrees would just provide friction. Elias (talk) 12:34, 9 June 2023 (UTC)