How Nissan one-upped Porsche to create the world's best all-wheel drive system.
In its day, the Porsche 959 was one of the most expensive cars in the world, around $225,000, depending on exchange rates. Adjusted for inflation, that's a little over $600,000. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Nissan bought one. Developing cars is an expensive endeavor, and automakers regularly purchase cars made by rivals for benchmarking. After all, you can't beat the competition if you aren't familiar with them, but in this case, Nissan wasn't building a supercar.
The original Quattro used a manually locking center differential that distributed torque evenly between the axles. As the front wheels are constantly driven, this contributes to a lot of grip, especially on loose surfaces, but also an understeer-dominant handling balance. Varying the amount of torque going to the front axle alters the handling balance. In the 959, a multi-plate clutch between the gearbox and front differential controlled how much torque went to the front axle.
It's the operating principle where the systems differ. ATTESA ET-S sends all of the torque to the rear axle until the rear wheels start to lose grip. When the ATTESA ET-S controller sees a variance in front and rear wheel speeds, hydraulic pressure applied to the multi-plate clutch diverts torque towards the front axle.
The road car used ATTESA ET-S to similar effect. A Nissan test driver famously lapped the GT-R around Nürburgring Nordschleife in 8:22, faster than any other production car of the time. Nissan implemented ATTESA ET-S throughout its lineup, and the automaker made a notable improvement to the system in 1995 in the form of an active limited-slip differential to control power across the rear axle.
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