I agree with all of the above, but it is important to clarify exactly what is meant by “rear engine”.
Nowadays, carmakers realize that putting an engine too far to the rear will result in extreme oversteer.
For instance, the Auto Union race cars of the 1930s had HUGE engines placed behind the rear wheels. In terms of straight-ahead traction, they were incredible. The problem however, became obvious on curves, with the result that a very high percentage of Auto Union’s professional racing drivers were killed in oversteer-induced crashes.
If we go to the late 1940s, the Tucker Torpedo (of which only about 50 were produced before the company went bust) had a large, high torque engine mounted behind the rear wheels. Although not enough of them were ever produced to produce a wide-spread safety issue, I believe that if these cars had gone into series production, there would have been a lot of deaths as a result of oversteer–which former drivers of understeering Front Engine/RWD vehicles would have been unable to cope with.
Then, as recently as the 1960s. GM’s Corvair also had the engine mounted behind the rear wheels. Like those earlier Auto Union cars, their straight-ahead traction was incredible, but on a slippery curve, many owners were unable to cope with the sudden oversteer, thus resulting in accidental deaths.
The shame of it all is that GM could have ameliorated these problems in two ways:
Instead of the cheaper swing-axle with which the cars were equipped, if GM had installed an articulated rear axle with two U-joints instead of just one, the increased amount of tire contact on curves would have reduced much of the oversteer problem. Only in the last-generation Corvair did GM spend a few bucks more for a better rear axle/suspension design.
And, the most highly-publicized problem with those early Corvairs was the reality that the cars needed drastically different tire pressures in the front and rear tires in order to prevent vicious oversteer…something along the lines of 16 lbs front and 28 lbs rear–or something to that effect. The information on the vitally important tire pressures was buried in the Owner’s Manual, rather than being prominently displayed on a label on the door jamb or inside the glove box. For owners of the more conventional cars of the day, it was typical to use 26 lbs all-around, and that was a potentially fatal error with the Corvair.
But, to get back to my point, what is frequently referred to nowadays as “rear-engine” is actually more akin to a mid-engine design, with the engine mounted either just in front of the rear wheels, or directly over them. This is, indeed, a packaging nightmare, but it tends to produce incredibly good traction and handling–unlike the older designs where the engine was placed in back of the rear wheels.