Simple arcade vehicle turning with or w/o wheel colliders

I cannot believe the nightmare time I am having trying to do this, but let me explain the end case:

I have a car driving mobile game that only needs simple non real life like controls to drive a car around a city. The game is in a zoomed out overhead cam (3/4 perspective, north is always up). If you need an old arcade game as reference, maybe RC pro am?

All I want is for the car to chug around at a moderate speed, and responsive easy turning when it turns.

Here is what I tried and here is what problem resulted:

1. Transform calls - actually was the best vehicle control to date, but bad except collisions and apparently a lot of other things don't get called.

2. No wheel colliders, just add force and add torque calls. The car turned like it was on pure ice. I thought moving the pivot point would help but it just changed where it slide from

3. a simple wheel collider setup from a tutorial: 1 box, 4 wheels. It seems like it should work since I am doing the allegedly "right" way to have a vehicle move. I am concerned about the overhead for a mobile game, but before I can address that, the car is handling terribly. When you turn it slows right down to a near halt (I just want to maintain speed).

I added acceleration variables to counter this a bit when turning, but the second issue is turning itself is horrid. It's like a cow on skates, you are in a small car but it takes turns so wide you would think its a cruise ship. What I mean is it understeers so badly its unplayable. I cant crank the wheels any to the left or right. Really everything is just unresponsive. Acceleration, turning, its just unwieldly.

My questions are:

Which one of these was the right way to go for an arcade like simple steering system that does not really car about real world physics (other than collisions / gravity)? What am I missing to make it work and hopefully stay low on calculation power?

I have read numerous posts and watched videos and I hear a lot of people saying they burned months figuring out vehicles. For such a simple system I am hoping that is not necessary. I am new to unity and VERY new to vehicles so don't assume I know anything in re to vehicles already please. Thank you!