Re: The old days - Aboard the Apollo - 1973
I think the first CVT tranny was on a tiny Subaru, I think. Might have been a Honda, but I think Subaru. was certainly some little asian shitbox. Too damn lazy to google it.
I like Gizmos last two posts about cars and trucks. They are excellent posts! I am not really a car and truck guy but I subscribe to Consumer Reports, Car Driver, Road and Track and Auto New, a detroit newspaper like publication tracks the industry from a business point of views such as sales volumes of all the companies as well as technical progress from all the companies.. I can't work on cars myself, I just read about them. My son can and did work on them extensively when he and I both lived at home.
On the CVT's, Continuously variable transmissions, several companies have come out with those but the CVT's have some stumbling blocks. The thing is that the US government is mandating extremely high gas mileage so the CVT's were calibrated along the lines of high gas mileage as their primary goal. If someone is driving for high fuel economy they probably work well.
A problem arises if a guy either needs fast acceleration to do a lane change or even worse, if a guy routinely drives fast, always taking off from a stop light with fast acceleration. For this type of driving, the car will often stumble or falter. The reason is as I stated above. The transmission is rigged for low rpm's to conserve gas but the owner needs to burn gas to accelerate. This amounts to the owner trying to override the normal operation of the transmission. This leads to flat spots and lags in performance when the CVT is ordered to accelerate fast. Because of that CVT's started to wane in popularity a few years back. Now, they are almost totally dead due to a further advance in technology.
Besides multi speed transmissions, about three years ago, the high priced luxury cars, mainly from Germany began making a new type of automatic shift mechanism. Previously, ever since automatics appeared in the late 1930's on the Oldsmobile, automatics eliminated direction shifting. Shifting had to go through something called a torque converter. It was sort of like a glorified oil bath. In the old days when most cars were still stick but a few had automatics, the automatics where called Slush Boxes, especially the Dynaflow drive by Buick.
The gears got shifted but the torque converter resulted in a lot of slippage and heat build up. The smoother the shift, the more waste in the torque converter. For this reason, stick shift cars got better gas mileage and accelerated faster than automatics. Stick shift actually changed gears without requirement any torque converter. The torque converter was probably one of the greatest inventions of all time in the automobile industry. It lasted from about 1937 to 2014 about 77 years!
However, around 2012 or 2013, the automatic stick shift, called automatic clutch transmissions, I believe, first appeared on a few luxury briands, Audi, BMW and Mercedes mainly. Since VW owns Audi, they even put some of these automatic clutch transmission on some models of the VW.
This new breakthrough in transmissions gives the best of both worlds. Any car with an automatic clutch will accelerate faster than a car with a stick shift because the automatic clutch can shift gears electronically faster than the most skilled drivers can shift a clutch manually. Now here is the kicker, the cars with the automatic clutch also get better gas mileage on the highway than cars with a stick shift. The reason why concerns only gear ratios selected by the manufacturers for highway driving on highways with rolling hills. The manufacturers chose the gear ratios to be lower on the stick shift cars than on the automatic clutch cars, thus the automatic clutch cars get significantly higher mileage in highway driving.
Anyway, the automatic clutch cars were such a huge upgrade from the torque converter transmissions plus they increased gas mileage so within a year or two the automatic clutch his replaced the torque converter at all prices levels of cars from cheapest to most expensive and the CVT transmssion no longer has a reason for existing and I believe it is already out of production because an automatic clutch transmission gives the best possible performance and best possible gas mileage. You go into any large car dealer today and it is extremely difficult to find a car with manual shift. Usually the biggest dealerships will have only one or two stick shifts on their lot.
Lakey
I won every distance between 2 traffic-lights, and then that BMW-wimp gave up and bailed out.
Well then, how about a Reality Check?
