I am led to believe that torque converters are less than perfect at doing their job, so while you are accelerating a lot of your engine’s energy is going into moving some liquid around in a centrifuge rather than pushing the car forward. And also to get the same acceleration you have to rev a lot higher (say 5-6 thousand revs) than in a manual (3-4 thousand)
When my car’s paid for I may sell it and get a new one.
Cons: I have got used to the convenience of not having to clutch control or change gears, no more sore left leg in traffic jams.
Your rear axle ratio has more to do with your engine revs and speed than the type of transmission. If your vehicle has a 3:25 rear gear ratio, your transmission is in a gear that provides a 1:1 ratio, the engine speed will be the same whether you have a manual or automatic transmission. Most modern automatic transmissions have lock up torque converters, this means at about 2000 to 3000 rpms it locks and the transmission is passing the same amount of power as a manual transmission. In fact, some automatics are more efficient when locked up than manuals and actually provide better fuel economy. Go to your local dragstrip and you will likely find more automatics than manual cars. I have driven manual transmission vehicles for years, my next will have have an automatic.
I’ve always justified it to myself in the same way but the numbers no longer bear it out, from what I’ve seen. Maybe they’ve been putting much more research into improving automatics and CVTs while MT tech has been stagnating.
Also, those numbers are based on expert, professional drivers. With your average driver, it’s likely that the 1 mile/gallon advantage of the manual transmission would disappear, possibly even show most drivers getting worse mileage from a manual than an automatic.
I recently got a Nissan Altima coupe, 2.5 4 cylinder (175hp) with a CVT transmission, and the acceleration is much better than a 4-banger has any right to be. You can push the engine above 5k if you put it to the floor, but you don’t really need to - it has a nice linear pedal feel and it usually stays below 4k rpm while I’m accelerating, and once I’m up to speed, the ratio adjusts so I purr along right around 2k rpm.
I’ve been told 3.5SL with the V-6 is all grunt, and rarely gets above 3500 rpm with the CVT. However, it was a bit out of my price range and I don’t really need all that power.
Yes, but with automatic transmissions, there is not much difference between professional and amateur drivers – the transmission does it automatically. But with manual transmissions, the expertise of the driver makes a significant difference.
My car is a 3.0 litre Jag S type Petrol (auto, obviously)
It’s a damn heavy car, but when I floor it I can get warp 9.5.
I’ve driven/owned it for about a year now. Recently I went to France and we hired a car, so I had to drive on the wrong (right) side of the road, on the wrong (right) side of the car, with manual transmission.
There were a few punches of the door (going for the gear stick with my left hand) and one episode where I (alone) got into the wrong side of the car after shopping :smack:
Edit: Oh, and I ‘forgot’ that in a manual, when the clutch is down, the car can roll quite freely down a hill*. I did this in a camp site on a very steep hill. A worrying few seconds wondering what the hell is happening before I slammed on the breaks… You see I am used to automatics (as you know) having a permanent push of power to the engine… enough to hold the car still when pointing up a steep hill with no feet on any pedals and no handbreak on.
Still, a bad driver can hurt his MPG in an auto by doing a lot of erratic speeding up and slowing down, and too much acceleration. An auto changes gears for you, but you decide how much to push the accelerator pedal down.
Only at consumer levels. High-end sports and racing MTs have come a long way in the last few years with Semi-autos (which despite the name are MTs), gapless shifting and all that.
It is sadly true that almost none of that is trickling down to consumer level, although true semi-autos (as opposed to autos with a user selection mode) are slowly inching down the price scale.
