@Scaff: I think if someone is looking for a fun FR car to mess around with on the weekends and stuff, they are not looking for a quiet, roomy interior. If someone is looking for a daily driver, they will not be looking for an FR.
It's just that they CAN make a good RWD car, they do have the ability, but they just don't.
They will sell, people will buy them, they will make money, but there's only a couple out right now, besides BMW and Mercedes; But they cost a lot more than most people have.
So you get back to the original question. Is RWD too much to ask for? I think not.
The original question posed by this thread was in regard to why sports compact models are not made with RWD, which my points, I think, clearly illustrate.
For the vast majority of people who buy cars, even sports compacts, they do not care about it being FWD. They buy these cars for the image and not the actual performance, the number of buyers that don't care about quiet, roomy cars are very, very small, and almost certainly not after a sports compact.
Working in the motor industry I can assure you that if you asked the 'average' driver of a sports compact what drive-train the car was, most would not be able to tell you, nor would most care. The average motorist cares about safety, space, kit and price; even when buying a 'sporty' car.
Its the enthusiast that has a different set of needs when buying a car, and to be honest, we simply are not enough in number to warrant loosing the 'average' buyers that would occur with a switch from FWD to RWD. Particularly as to do so would increase the cost of the car, this point is not debatable, the one example that exists on the market today in the form of the BMW 1-series is not selling well, even with the cache that the BMW badge still provides. It simply does not tick the right boxes for the average driver of this type of car, and barely provides more interior room than the MINI, which outsells the 1-series by a healthy degree.
That's why the niche models exist, to meet the needs of the enthusiast, for the price of a massively compromised 1-series with a decent engine I could by a Renaultsport Clio as a daily driver (which would give me more space and more kit) and pick up a second hand kit car such as a Tiger or Dax (Lotus/caterham 7 clones).
So to get back to the original question of 'is rear-wheel drive too much to ask for', well that depends on the customer. For the 'average' driver who forms the vast majority of buyers yes it is too much of a compromise, for the enthusiast the answer is of course no, but at present we simply don't buy enough of these type of cars to make it worth it. Lets be honest if the demand from the market existed on a large enough scale then manufacturers would be making compact models with rear wheel drive, and contarary to what has been said, taking a shopping model such as the Civic and converting it too RWD just for the sports version(s) is not even remotely financially viable for any manufacturer. Which means all versions of (to use the example) the Civic would need to be RWD and the average driver would not buy the car, due to the compromises it would bring, the model would fail and we would have no car to buy.
Why do you think that manufacturers stopped making small RWD cars? Simply because the average driver saw the advantages offered by rival FWD models, such as price and space, and went and bought them.
Now don't get me wrong here as a total petrolhead I would love to be able to choose from a wide range of resonably priced RWD cars, however I have also worked in the industry for long enough to know that for a good 90-95% of buyers its simply does not figure as even relivent when picking a car and the compramises it brings are normally not acceptable, particularly with smaller cars. The sad fact is that most BMW drivers would not have a clue that the cars are RWD, most will have bought it because its a BMW, and they ignore the rubbish rear legroom because of the badge. The same holds true for Merc drivers. MB made a big thing about the A-class being its first FWD car, and the public took no notice of it at all, they bought it because it was cheap for a Merc), small on the outside with lots of room on the inside and had a Merc badge on the front. Even the fact that the early ones had a desire to fall over did not make a blind bit of difference.
Regards
Scaff