Did you come to an age where you switched to an automatic?

i've never driven any DSG, but going by the reviews all over the internet, i figured they were by now as good/as useable as a manual.
thanks for setting that straight!

Just to clarify: DSG -is- good. it is smooth and nice and ready. But it's not much about the ability and the touch of the driver, it'is about electronics. You simply press a pedal and you give an indication on what you want to do. The car will interpret it and react accordingly. It matters very few if you ram on the pedal as you were a demon or if you caress it gently to feel the car's feed-back: electronics is electronics. You have to adapt to the car's action and reaction times, not the other way around.

It's another step out of the gut feelings and into the joystick mode.

With a manual and a clutch, ability and touch, particularly for driving smoothness at all speeds and quick reactions, matter way more.

So, all in all, I agree with:

all hail to the manual!! :bow:
 
Mine starts to go backwards... I used to be really big fan of automatics since I had my license, but lately I've been thinking that it might not be too bad thing to have a manual. With a proper, big engine to go with it. With unpowerful engines automatic is the way to go, manual won't make it any better.

I so rarely drive in city traffic that the extra pedal wouldn't bother too much.
 
Mine starts to go backwards... I used to be really big fan of automatics since I had my license, but lately I've been thinking that it might not be too bad thing to have a manual. With a proper, big engine to go with it. With unpowerful engines automatic is the way to go, manual won't make it any better.

I so rarely drive in city traffic that the extra pedal wouldn't bother too much.

You got it completely backwards, underpowered engines are better with manuals because they tend to have less parasitic loss, the car itself is lighter and you can control which gear you are in and for how long.
 
That's the common misunderstanding. When car does not have power, it does not have it no matter what's the transmission. With an underpowered car you should simply get as comfortable as possible. With high amount of power automatic tends to take the peak out, and makes the car feel less powerful than it actually is.
 
That's the common misunderstanding. When car does not have power, it does not have it no matter what's the transmission. With an underpowered car you should simply get as comfortable as possible. With high amount of power automatic tends to take the peak out, and makes the car feel less powerful than it actually is.

That's not a misunderstanding.... I drive a 165hp station wagon with a manual... Think about it this way, when you are dealing with a large power number even though you have a bigger drop in power you still have way more power than is realistically going to be used (in normal driving).
 
165 is not little amount of power. I've driven 75hp W124 with an automatic and that was just perfect. A lot more comfortable than the manual I had.
 
The only vehicle of that sort that i have driven is my Blizzard, which is a 5 speed, so it's hard to say how an automatic would feel. It sure as hell feels as slow as it is.
 
165 is not little amount of power. I've driven 75hp W124 with an automatic and that was just perfect. A lot more comfortable than the manual I had.

That's very little, the lowest HP car I've driven was an auto Camry, 125ish I think (can't be arsed to look up) and it was complete and utter shit. You could feel the delay between the flywheel and the TC. "Comfortable" doesn't make sense to me, car's comfort has little to do with its power and everything with the suspension, seats and sound deadening.

Look at it this way, there is a certain amount of loss you are getting at the driveline, the power power you have to "waste" the more you end up at the wheels and at some point the amount of power you have at the wheels will be such that it makes little difference how much you lost on the way there. Say a 300hp car where only 250 makes it to the wheels will be much faster than a 200hp car with 190 making it to the wheels* however same 200hp car with only 150 at the wheels will be slower.

*Assuming all other things being equal of course like weight, drivetrain type, etc..
 
My commute takes about 45minutes to go about 10km (about 6.5 miles) because I essentially have to cross some of the busiest road ways and rail-lines in Australia and it never worries me too much, it's just second nature to change gears

The buick's manual is much more involved, 3spd with the direct opposite pattern of a modern car and no syncros at all
 
My commute takes about 45minutes to go about 10km (about 6.5 miles) because I essentially have to cross some of the busiest road ways and rail-lines in Australia and it never worries me too much, it's just second nature to change gears

The buick's manual is much more involved, 3spd with the direct opposite pattern of a modern car and no syncros at all

My problem is usually my left foot getting tired but for one my left foot is prone to cramps in general and for two the clutch in the Z is the heaviest I have ever encountered outside of tuner cars.
 
"Comfortable" doesn't make sense to me, car's comfort has little to do with its power and everything with the suspension, seats and sound deadening.
Weren't you just in that other thread talking about smoothness of power delivery? Sounds a bit like comfort to me :p

But I mostly agree. Small engines and autos suck. I live in a hilly area, no journey does not involve a hill of some kind, and small engines and particularly autos with few speeds (like 4) make a meal of it. I find it much easier to maintain a steady speed up hills in a manual where I can select a gear myself rather than leave an auto to get to a hill, start to slow down, refuse to downshift until its too late, then eventually go OH SHIT HILL! and throw it into 1st and jerk you wildly.

It might not help that my experience in this field is mostly limited to an Astra H automatic.
 
Had nothing to do with age for me, but a few years of commuting through stop and go traffic every single day just made me hate manuals more than I liked them, so I actively started looking for a new car and went with the automatic. After over 2.5 years with it, I every now and then would like to have a manual just for the fun of it, but even those moments are getting rarer (primarily because modern autoboxes are getting damn good). The only things that could make me go manual again with the next car are either a car that just has to be manual (in my personal opinion, be it due to technical or sentimental reasons), or the price point, as over here an automatic gearbox usually is a >2k EUR option (in case its a new car).
 
Weren't you just in that other thread talking about smoothness of power delivery? Sounds a bit like comfort to me :p
That's a factor sure but a small engine with an auto isn't going to have a smooth power delivery either :p
 
But I mostly agree. Small engines and autos suck. I live in a hilly area, no journey does not involve a hill of some kind, and small engines and particularly autos with few speeds (like 4) make a meal of it. I find it much easier to maintain a steady speed up hills in a manual where I can select a gear myself rather than leave an auto to get to a hill, start to slow down, refuse to downshift until its too late, then eventually go OH SHIT HILL! and throw it into 1st and jerk you wildly.

I've just spent a week in a heavy manual 1.6 diesel with loads of hills and tiny roads... and while it was fun, the optional 7-speed DSG would have been better for comfort and speed. In a traditional few-speed auto it'd be a different story of course, that would eat too many of the few horses it has and not be able to use the narrow torque band well.
 
Yep, DSG solves the issue that slush box automatics had in the past. Although modern ten trillion gear autos seem to have made a lot of progress despite having a torque converter.
 
I wouldn't mind going back to a torque converter. I don't doubt that DCT's have developed since my 7 speed DQ200 was designed (and it's a beancounter design anyway) but I miss the smoothness of my old 4 and 5 speed slushboxes in stop and go traffic.

But the fact that you can get a 2.0 TDI Passat with 4motion that does 0-100 in 6.1 seconds is a statement to the fact that DCT's can do wonders for a narrow diesel powerband. There's probably no way in hell you could reach those numbers with a manual transmission.

0-100 is not really the most important of metrics though, it's just a well established benchmark. For example, my car does 0-100 in a pedestrian 9.9 or something, but it can do things like speed up from 120 to 160 in a tall gear without a care in the world. It just feels so unrefined when I'm driving a car where you need to drop a couple of cogs to make anything happen.

 
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