Front vs Rear Track

It has to do with engineering stability into the handling of the vehicle....When you are pushing a car into a corner you want all the wheels to give at the same time....so if the weight is distributed other than 50/50 you can compensate with track width or tire width....The track is measured wheel center to center, so if you have a wider tire on the back or front, it might just appear to be a wider track....that is of course if we are discussing an automobile used on the road in a normal fashion....

Impossible to answer.

Too many variables.

Too many things more important that track.

Get a motorcycle, moped, tricycle, motorcycle with side car, unicycle or a bicycle. Consequences of less than 4 wheels is you don't have to worry about the track!

Good Luck, Old Salt

Motorcycles have different size wheels and different widths of tyres allong with different tyre compositions to help them to drop in when cornering, manafacture specifications usually are followed by tyre insallers very stringently .

Excellent answer for the motorcycles! For the OP's benefit, what about the moped, tricycle, motorcycle with side car, unicycle or a bicycle? Never had to take a tricycle to have it's tires tuned or worry about the track of it's drive axle with only one wheel. Likewise for the unicycle.

Good Luck, Old Salt

Cars that have front engines, gearboxes and front-wheel drive hardly need rear wheels, except to stop them scraping on the ground!

My old Citroen DS21 had visibly narrower rear track. Some hot Porsches appear to have narrower front track (but might be just wider rear wheels).

Roll stability is most affected by the track at the heavy end.

Sensibly, the wider track is usually more useful for traction on the drive wheels.

I doubt your facts................ The 5 models of Swift I looked at share only three sizes between them, and they are uniform (Front = Back in all cases).

The sizes are : 175/65 R16; 185/55 R16; 195/50 R16

In regard to why the Swift and Honda use different front/rear tracks, it has to do with engineering and costs. Honda tries to engineer their cars to be safe, reliable, good driving and efficient. Suzuki on the other hand is probably looking at cost savings over some of the criteria Honda looks at.

If you push the tires out wide, you increase the stress on the suspension parts and the chassis. Since there is more weight on the front end of front wheel drive cars, there will be more stress in pushing the wheels further out vs pushing the back wheels out. So Suzuki can cut corners by keeping the front narrower than the rear, hence less stress of on the suspension and chassis of the car = cheaper to produce. Honda isn't as cost conscious as Suzuki, so they can put more money into a better chassis/suspension and push the front wheels out further than the rears.

I know Honda pretty well and I think they do a phenomenal job engineering their cars. If there's a way to improve the car, Honda has done it (or is working on it).