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Automotive News & Views The Future Of The Manual Transmission
5809 messages, Last post on Dec 03, 2009 at 12:30 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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Replying to: nippononly (Sep 05, 2008 10:00 am) I've always known the EPA ratings were crap but I wouldn't be so sure about their methodology favoring an autobox. Of the many cars I've owned since those ratings were introduced the only one in which I've been able to consistently outdo the EPA numbers is my autobox Bimmer, one of two A/T cars I've owned. I'm more inclined to agree with your second statement. A dedicated hypermiler ought to be able to do better in a manual than with a juicebox but to me that's irrelevant. I like to drive fast and there's a good chance my next car will have a twin/clutch sequential that will out-perform it's manual counterpart and get better mileage. 
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Replying to: andys120 (Sep 05, 2008 1:05 pm)
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Replying to: lemmer (Sep 05, 2008 1:23 pm) As I understand it the main reason is that there is less interruption of power going to the drivetrain as there is when you disengage the clutch to put it into another gear , a DSG is always "in gear" so to speak, this helps with acceleration too, IIRC. The quickness and smoothness of the shifts also means less variance in RPMs and steady-state rpms generally deliver better mileage and less pollution, a big factor in Europe where car mfrs are under pressure to decrease carbon emissions dramatically. I won't pretend to know exactly how those things work but that's my understanding of how they work. |
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| Always in gear means less ideling and coasting hence more fuel. | |
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One thing that CR does do right is that they test 0-60 times like normal people. No revving it to 6000rpm in 3rd and slamming the clutch or manually shifting the automatic when it hits redline. Fifth Gear(U.K. Car show) recently tested to see if they could get close to the listed times. Now, these are car guys who drive cars for a living, day in and day out. They got to 80% of the listed time with a Mini Cooper S and flogging the hell out of it. Completely unrealistic. Most cars were 3-5 seconds slower driven by mashing the pedal in first and letting it do what it wanted.
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Replying to: plekto (Sep 05, 2008 5:29 pm) Wow, so they manage to take something totally objective in measurement and make it fuzzy to the point of being a subjective measure? Yup, another meaningless number, sign me up.
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Replying to: lilengineerboy (Sep 06, 2008 9:35 am) Where I live with few stoplights leading to long straights and lots of two lane roads you want good acceleration from 20-50. I dunno why anyone would manually shift the automatic  redline, most autos do that automatically. Do they mean manually shifting at the top of the torque curve which is sometimes just short of redline?
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How does testing every car the same way make it fuzzy? Consumer reports tests are more objective than anybody elses. They test every car the same way and it is clearly spelled out in their magazine and on their web site. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/new-cars/auto-test/at-the-track-consumer- -reports-auto-test-center/index.htm Some of the car mags will brag about how they flooged a car or how they brought in several pro drivers and took the best time of all of them for one car, yet when they test the family cars they just have a writer do a seat of the pants number. Besides that, we are comparing apples to apples - not one tester to another.
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Replying to: dudleyr (Sep 06, 2008 9:08 pm) So do they redline the car or not? Do they shift at peak hp or peak torque? Do they trigger the WOT switch or not? All I saw on that website was a picture of their facility and a blurb about how they test 0-60 multiple times in both directions (just like everybody else) and that they measure the coefficient of friction of the tarmac. They also don't mention (but I am sure they do it) how to correct for temperature and altitude (since they do all their testing at the same facility, they probably don't have to worry about altitude) The procedure for an automatic should be something like 1. stage vehicle, 2. floor vehicle while giving as little steering input as possible driving as straight as possible 3. Exceed 60 by a significant margin (ie 70) and read from the DAS how long it took to hit 60. A manual transmission there are other variables, like when to shift, if you light up the tires at the start, how much you use the clutch, etc. Abuse will get you a faster 0-60 (or not), but I am not going to do a brake stall on an automatic (pushing the brake and then pushing the gas until it starts to overwhelm the brake, then dropping the brake and flooring the gas) or power-shifting in a manual transmission car (kind of hard on the syncros...). Some magazines will and some wont but they ALL do provide their procedure. Some of the car mags will brag about how they flooged a car or how they brought in several pro drivers and took the best time of all of them for one car, yet when they test the family cars they just have a writer do a seat of the pants number. I haven't seen this so much to be the case, except when testing or evaluating press vehicles that were not able to be instrumented.
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Replying to: lilengineerboy (Sep 07, 2008 5:22 am) For manuals, I think they rev it up enough to take off without bogging or major wheel spin, shift at redline, and go to 60. I think it provides some pretty useful information. I've noticed over time that their numbers correspond very closely to the car mags (plus a couple of tenths). Unlike the car mags, they never have anomalies where a car has a time out of line with everyone else. I've given up on 0-60 times anyway. With today's faster cars and the differing testing procedures, 1/4 mile trap speed tells you more about a car's horsepower than anything else. |
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