Was Acura and the Sh-awd the first company with this technology? It's strange to see that so many companies are now mentioning it in their cars. Even Kia has put this tech in their Sportage and Sorento.

 

On the 1999 ( or 98 ?) -2001 Honda Prelude, they had a Type SH version which did torque vectoring on the front wheels since it is a FWD layout.

 

Most of the companies advertising "torque vectoring" are a little grandiose in their ad print. They simply use independent braking on the drive wheels to retard slippage (and power delivery to that wheel). I'm pretty sure that Kias/Hyundais are not delivered with real torque vectoring, such as SH-AWD, where the car can deliver varying degrees of torque to the drive wheels depending on yaw rates, tire slippage, etc. without actually simply braking a wheel.

Of course, this wouldn't be the first time Hyundai/Kia did a little exaggerating in their advertising, would it? Remember "40 mpg"?

 

Wikipedia says Mitsubishi used it first in their racing application. The technology has evolved, of course, so I would think the earliest implementation is not like the latest implementation.

 

What does Torque Vectoring exactly mean in the new Hybrid RLX?

 

Look at this video and picture the ends 'swapped'. The RLX will have the gas engine+1 Hybrid motor on the front axle, and the 2X motors on the rear.

 

Acura isn't first that came out with an active, torque vectoring AWD system. Mitsubishi came out its own on the Lan Evo first.

However, SH-AWD is the first electro-magnetic system to combine ATTS (found in the Prelude) and VTM-4 (found in earlier MDX, Pilot, etc) and then have the whole thing integrated with ABS, VSA, EBD, throttle, yaw angle sensor, speed sensor, steering angle sensor, and lateral-g sensor.

Mitsubishi then came up with S-AWC (super all-wheel-control) which is pretty much SH-AWD + performance tuning.

 

IIRC, McLaren F1 cars used to use brake torque vectoring, before it was banned in Formula 1.