Manual vs automatic transmission

The next time you're stuck in a city traffic jam, think how much easier it would be if your car had automatic transmission. If you already have it, wait until an empty open road beckons and think how much more pleasurable it would be to have a manual gearbox.

Advancing Development

It used to be that simple but the edges of the argument have become increasingly blurred. Engine manufacturers over the last few years have increasingly concentrated on improving torque – pulling power through the gears. As a result, even small engines have become much more user-friendly. Whereas before, it was necessary to be changing gears all of the time, especially around town, a much more relaxing approach to driving can now be adopted – one that could lead even urban owners to question the need for automatic transmission.

Auto ‘boxes too, have developed – to the point where you could argue against the need for bothering with a manual. Almost all now come with a ‘Tiptronic-style’ manual option that enables the more enthusiastic driver to push up and down to ‘manually’ change gear, rather as they would on a PlayStation or a video game. After the first few miles however, the novelty of this tends to wear off: we are, after all, still talking about an automatic gearbox with all the attendant disadvantages of weight, height fuel consumption and poorer performance.

One way of getting round these disadvantages is to make sure that the auto ‘box in question is one of the CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission) rubber-belt driven varieties. The advantages of CVT include hardly any weight penalty (so little impact on fuel consumption) and an instancy of response that hardly drains performance at all.

Best Of Both Worlds

If you really want the best of both worlds of course, the only answer is one of those clutchless ‘manual’-style transmissions. An example being the ‘Selespeed’ system This is a real manual gearbox that can be manually operated by paddles around the steering wheel – just like an F1 car.

Ideas sharing many of the same principles are the Easytronic and Sequentronic systems offered respectively by Vauxhall and Mercedes. No paddles here but you don’t have to worry about a clutch.. Saab (with ‘Sensonic’) and Renault (with their ‘Easy’ system) both dabbled with systems like these and caught a financial cold, so it will be interesting to see whether these systems will ever catch on.

Shifting To A Close?

Are the days of the manual gearbox really numbered? It could be. Bear in mind that a driver often de-clutches up to eighty times in one mile of stop-start traffic, with a muscular effort of 10-15kg each time; so in one mile, your left leg may displace as much as 1,200kg!

That's theory; this is fact. In the American emissions test, which includes 12km of urban driving, it's been officially established that the driver of a manual gearbox car displaces the equivalent of seven tonnes with his left leg, which is energy that could be saved by using an automatic. On the face of it then, the market in affordable cars for a gearbox that combines the ease of an automatic with the satisfaction of a `stick shift` ought to be huge.

Still, though the engineers have got pretty close, even now, no one has quite cracked it. Whether they will, only time can tell.

Published: 7th July 2008