Understeer vs. Oversteer: What's the Difference?

Understeering and oversteering are two common issues drivers have. How do they occur, and how can they be confronted in real time?
Written by Alex Reale
Reviewed by Kathleen Flear
If you’ve ever played the video game “Mario Kart,” you’ll know that one of the fastest ways to shoot past your competitors is to recklessly gun it into a turn without slowing down. Then you hold down the R button on your joystick.
Your vehicle will not only magically withstand the intensity of the turn, it will actually increase your speed, and you can wave backward at an outraged Wario. 
This is Nintendo’s (hyperrealistic) tribute to the oversteer. What is the difference between oversteer and understeer, and why would an oversteer sometimes be advantageous? Here are some
tips
and things to know. 

Steers for fears

Steering a car is a fairly simple proposition. A turn comes along in the road, so you turn the wheel and follow the curve. But if you introduce a few unsteadying factors, like increasing your speed or doing a poor job manipulating the steering wheel, then the whole process can backfire. 
Understeering is more predictable and easier to correct, according to a helpful video from Car Throttle (below). It happens when your front wheels lose traction, which can come from employing excessive speed or hard braking around a corner.Your car travels past the curve instead of leaning into it, hopefully into a nice field. 
This is more likely to happen with front-wheel drive cars, whose front wheels are doing both the turning and the accelerating, but it can happen with rear and all wheel drive cars as well. 
If you’re finding yourself in an understeering situation, it can feel reasonable to try to turn harder into the corner as you feel your car missing the turn window. Try to resist this urge, as it will only further lock your tires into an undesired angle, and instead ease off the gas gently. And don’t just let go of the gas all at once, which will transfer all the weight immediately to the front of the car—a classic spin-causer.   
Though understeering can feel scary, it’s preferred in most cases of traditional driving. Most new cars are actually designed to err on the side of understeering. So if you feel it happening, don’t panic, just release the gas gently until you feel the traction return. Then you’re back on your way.
MORE: What Is a Transmission?
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The art of the oversteer

Oversteering is a bit like mountain climbing. It’s dangerous for everyone, but the professionals have a skewed sense of the inherent risk/reward, and will happily attempt it at every opportunity.
An oversteer is the loss of your rear wheels’ grip around a corner, which then causes the back of the car to lift off the ground and rotate past its center. So instead of rounding a curve and missing it, as with understeer, you round a curve and the back of the car just keeps on rounding, until you might be spun around facing the other direction. 
This can happen for a variety of reasons, including if too much gas is applied on a curve, if you let go of the gas too fast, or if the car is in too low a gear at high speed. Regardless of the cause, the back wheels will lock up, or the weight of the car will be thrown forward, and that lovely traction on your rear axles is gone. 
To deal with oversteer as a civilian, use
Autoweek’s
helpful acronym CPR: correct, pause, and recover. Correct your front tires by keeping them in the same line that you’re trying to go by countersteering, pause as you feel the back of your car line back up again, and recover by straightening out. Don’t brake hard, and add gentle throttle as you go through the process. 
Of course, if you’re a professional driver or simply a lucky car nut with access to an empty road, oversteering might actually be your goal. The point is to achieve the phenomenal sensation of drifting so artfully captured by the makers of “Mario Kart.” 
Drivers intentionally oversteer the car so that traction on the back wheels is lost, but instead of trying to correct it, they use the brakes and steering to lean further into the turn, so the car remains suspended in a locked, yet tractionless, state. We’ll have to ask if the thrill compares to free soloing Half Dome.

Steer toward better coverage

MORE: The Ultimate Car Tune-Up Checklist
Car Throttle summarizes these two steering issues like this: “Understeer scares drivers, oversteer scares passengers.” 
So if you’re looking to avoid doing any scaring while you’re steering, stick with posted speed limits and make sure you know how to react to any accidental unders or overs. And if you really need your oversteering fix, check out Nintendo.
Done some oversteering and wondering about your coverage?
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