All sorts of reasons, but it's got a lot to do with packaging and handling. Generally you want the weight distribution of the car to be 50:50 front:rear for optimal handling.

A car will handle great if you can put the engine and transmission somewhere towards the middle, but obviously that isn't great news for passengers. Mid-engined cars exist, of course, but they're usually two-seater sports cars where space and comfort are lower down the list of priorities.

So you're left with putting the engine somewhere towards the front, or somewhere towards the back. Some manufacturers, like BMW, achieve ideal weight distribution by mounting the engine relatively far back in the front of the car, and putting the transmission and some other heavy bits at the back. This is elegant, but too complex and expensive for your average runabout.

With a front-engined car, you can safely put some of the engine forward of the front axle. Doing so means more space in the passenger cabin, but hanging the weight out front makes the car nose-heavy. In an average front-wheel-drive family car, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and might even be desirable, as it means good traction and a tendency towards boring, predictable understeer.

Sling the weight out back, like a Porsche 911, and you get the opposite problem: the car naturally tends to want to swap ends in corners. Some drivers find this fun, right up until it kills them. If a 911 is a safe car today, it's because Porsche has spent decades pigheadedly perfecting a layout everybody else abandoned long ago for its tendency to send you backwards through hedges.

> Automakers began to abandon the rear-engined layout in the 1970s, with only a handful of cars still available in the 1980s. This was due to the fact that rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive cars were prone to oversteer, which caused vehicle instability.

https://www.topspeed.com/cars/car-news/10-rear-engined-cars-...

It's more than just that. The skateboard design for dedicated EV platforms makes for a better-protected passenger cell. Whereas before you had to dedicate all this steel into keeping the car rigid while mounting this heavy 250kg engine all the way up front, usually in front of the wheels (and plus all the attendant powertrain stuff), now instead a lot of that steel is dedicated to maintaining the integrity of the passenger cell, concomitant to maintaining integrity of the battery skateboard.

As for why few companies put the ICE engine in the back, whereas front-engine layouts tend towards understeer, rear-engine layouts tend toward oversteer, which is a safety and usability issue for the 99th percentile of drivers (and that's after you put in the engineering to make it work). Porsche spent a lot of effort making rear-engine safe. The design also results in less room for storage.

Expense. Much of engine design is getting rid of heat, which is much harder in the wind shadow of the car. It also makes it harder to have a good weight balance, and you end up adding significant engineering to keep the rear heavy car from having undesirable handling characteristics ... which is something the Porsche 911 has been battling for decades.

Does it make sense? I thought there was a survival advantage to having a giant chunk of metal absorbing the impact of a head-on collision. Assuming that it is routed under you instead of into you - which it is.

Fwd is cheaper and easier to provide interior and storage space.