Safety First: Understeering and Oversteering Explained

Understanding the difference between understeering and oversteering isn’t that difficult. We here at Maus Nissan are always concerned about your safety and educating you on how to best handle dangerous situations with your vehicle, so we’ve put together a simple explanation.

Understeering limits your vehicle’s ability to steer and causes it to make too wide of a turn. Oversteering is just the opposite: it makes the vehicle take too sharp of a turn and spin out. Front-wheel-drive cars are most likely to understeer. This is usually a result of over-accelerating during a turn which moves the weight to the back of the car rendering the steering useless. Slamming the wheel to one side too far or too quickly will have the same effect.

Rear-wheel-drive vehicles are more likely to oversteer. The power is in the back, so when the vehicle fishtails or loses traction in the rear, it will overpower the front and the driver will lose control of the steering wheel.

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