Understeer vs. Oversteer: What’s the Difference?

Driving should be convenient, enjoyable, and safe. Your vehicle’s handling plays a big part in determining how pleasant your driving experience goes. Whether it’s a car, SUV, truck, or something else, it should respond quickly when you turn the steering wheel and change directions.

Nothing is perfect, though, and your car’s steering doesn’t always follow that rule. If you often go fast, there might come a time when your vehicle won’t respond when you turn the steering wheel, continuing its original course and overshooting the corner where you want to go. This is called understeer.

Conversely, your vehicle’s wheels can turn far faster and sharper than normal. If it changes direction too early and turns too sharply, you might have to hit the brakes to avoid ending up in an accident. This scenario is called oversteer.

Whether your vehicle oversteers or understeers, it can get you in trouble on the road. But what is over and understeer, exactly? And when it comes to understeer vs oversteer, which is more dangerous?

Read on to find out more about what these terms mean and what you can do to prevent them.

What Is Understeer?

Understeer happens when your vehicle keeps moving forward despite you turning the steering wheel due to insufficient tire traction.

Tires grip the road to propel the vehicle forward and change directions. If the tires don’t generate enough traction, they can slip across the surface.

While understeer can happen to any vehicle type, it most commonly develops in vehicles that use a front-wheel drive (FWD) powertrain. In this type of powertrain, the engine sends power to the front wheels, turning them to propel the machine.

Turning the front wheels sharply while the tires are rapidly spinning can reduce the treads’ grip on the road surface.

What Is Oversteer?

There are many movies and motorsports events where daring drivers send their cars drifting across the road to make an impossibly tight turn without slowing down. Drifting is a deliberate form of oversteer.

Oversteer is what happens when your vehicle is going too fast while you’re making a turn, and your considerable momentum overcomes the rear tires’ ability to stay in contact with the road surface. Once the tires lose their traction, they slide.

If you’re looking behind you—be it over your shoulder or in a rear-facing mirror—while your vehicle oversteers, you’ll see the rear end spin toward the front end. Any vehicle can end up oversteering if its rear tires lose traction. However, rear-wheel-drive (RWD) vehicles are much more likely to oversteer.

Understeer vs. Oversteer

Understeer and oversteer have one thing in common: they both involve the tires losing traction during turns while the vehicle is moving at high speeds.

However, when a vehicle understeers, the front end doesn’t turn when it’s supposed to. The opposite happens with oversteer—the rear end rotates toward the front.

Another difference is the vehicle powertrain that’s more likely to have this effect. FWD vehicles tend to understeer because they supply power to the front wheels, while RWD vehicles are more likely to oversteer because their rear wheels are driven.

Furthermore, understeer is harder to control than oversteer. If you’re a skilled driver with a firm grasp of your vehicle’s capabilities, you can deliberately oversteer to slide around the apex point of a corner. This is the whole point of drifting.

What Can Cause Understeer and Oversteer?

There are two types of factors that play a role in oversteering and understeering: Passive factors and active factors.

Passive factors encompass the various characteristics of a car. These include its design, construction methods, parts, and how it handles various road surfaces.

Meanwhile, active factors originate from the driver–specifically, the way they drive the vehicle and use parts like the brakes and steering.

Both oversteer and understeer share the same passive and active factors. We’ll briefly go over them.

Passive Factors in Oversteering and Understeering

• Uneven weight distribution that favors one end over the opposite
• Powertrain (oversteering only) and drive (understeering) layout
• The way the suspension and chassis are set up
• Tire factors like type, wear, and pressures

Active Factors in Oversteering and Understeering

• Cornering speed
• Throttle
• Hitting the brakes
• Steering inputs like turning the steering wheel too fast or far
• Weight transferring while driving

How to Stop Understeer

If you do find your vehicle understeering, don’t panic. You can still regain or even maintain control of it through the slide. Here’s what you have to do:

• Take your foot off the brake and gas pedal.
• Move the steering wheel throughout the slide.
• Keep the front wheels pointed in the direction you want to take.
• Use the brakes, but don’t step on the brake pedal too fast or hard.

Once you sense the tires regain traction, you can drive like usual. Just make sure to take things more carefully.

Oversteering and Understeering: Which is More Dangerous?

Generally speaking, understeering is far safer than oversteering, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that either of the two situations is ideal. Though understeering might be more difficult to control than oversteering, this doesn’t make it a more dangerous phenomenon.

If your vehicle understeers and you make no active effort to get it back under control, your vehicle will remain stable and maintain a steady trajectory. The rear wheels may remain stiff and turn less than you’d anticipate, but you can at least predict which way the vehicle will go and make adjustments.

On the other hand, if your vehicle oversteers and you make no active effort to get it back under control, your vehicle will spin out of control. You won’t have an easy time predicting where it will go since the rear wheels will spin as you lose traction and grip on the road. This can potentially lead to more oversteering.