1982. With AWD being something we now understood, it was time to test the market, a hard test between two great cars, identical in every way, except one difference. One car would be RWD, like everyone expected, and the other would be AWD.
The design teams talked for almost a week about what kind of car it should be. The body team wanted to do a big four-door car, the engine team wanted to try something new for a change, the suspension and chassis team were content to do another unibody with double wishbones, our interior team wanted to do something comfortable, and our lawyers were mentioning that we should seriously consider something with "less than 300 horsepower" to "keep the insurance companies happy."
So the naming board got to work throwing darts at a bunch of bits of paper stuck on a poster of a car from some small Japanese car company and landed the name Sentinel.
About a week later, the engine team called a meeting (rather unusual for them) and unveiled what they'd been working on.
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Once the shock of the meeting wore off (usually, an Engine Team 'meeting' was mostly "let's go chat by the water cooler" and nothing serious like this), we looked over the new engine. With six pistons, a turbocharger, and multi-point fuel injection, it looked simply stunning. The power sheets were set down neatly on top of the blue-painted valve covers, and the figures were impressive, though not shocking. 280 horsepower, which made the lawyers happy. The body team seemed happy, because the engine would fit, though it was a little bit of a squeeze. The suspension team seemed okay with it, as the weight wasn't that much. The interior team was indifferent, having already planned to put a luxury interior in whatever was built.
A long while later, the two cars were built, though there were two differences instead of the planned one. When asked about it, the Drivetrain team simply mentioned, "We tried to kill some of the wheel spin in the RWD model with a geared limited slip. The AWD one doesn't have that problem, so we left it with open diffs."
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The two cars sat next to one another, and we all spent time picking at every little detail. Eventually, we all agreed to just test drive the damn things and quit staring at them. The automatic transmissions were flawless, smoothly picking through their four speeds to find just the perfect gear for the situation. The Hydropneumatic suspension ate up the bumps (and we majorly owe Pharte for their technology on that front) and the soft seats made it quite comfortable to drive around.
- Storm Sentinel - LX Twins2.png (1.1 MiB) Viewed 4577 times
After putting about four-thousand miles on each car, each of us came to our own conclusions on which car we liked more. We handed both cars over to the test drivers, and they came back with a set of arbitrary numbers detailing what they liked about the cars.
Both cars sold rather well. More AWD models were sold, though the results were a bit skewed because
someone put a geared limited slip diff in the RWD model, making it more expensive than the AWD one.