Slivka

Educate me, please, if you will.

As I was cruising along the front right CV joint broke and the car just coasted to a stop and was dead in the water. I want to understand why despite having quattro it was not able to move.

As I understand my 2000 A4 with manual and quattro has open front and rear diffs with torsen in the middle. So I get that the front end became useless as all power went to the free spinning axle with broken CV joint. Here is what I don't get. Shouldn't the middle torsen diff still have sent power to rear wheels?

Thanks much.

David.Norton

The Torsen article in Wikipedia has a good run down on operation of the diff, if a wheel has no torque the diff will still act like an open diff.

Slivka

Right. I erroneously assumed that unlike open diff, Torsen can still work with one end having 0 traction. Apparently not. Oh well.