Quote:
Originally Posted by ItsJustMyCaddy  Stick. It's one of the reasons I didn't jump on the $1k/month E55 lease special they were having around the time I bought my '07 V. The automatic does not allow for me to have a "relationship" with the car, it would just be getting me from point A to point B. When I tell non-car enthusiasts that, they just look at me funny, but I am sure many of you feel the same. If you pick the appropriate shift points, perform the appropriate maintenance, etc, you can get the most out of your car. |
As far as I'm concerned it's all in the calibration.
With enough torque an automatic can work really, really well.
But...whoever's setting the thing up has to know what they're doing and be working toward the proper set of goals.
Most automatics are calibrated to resist part-throttle downshifts, and even when you've got pushbuttons or a tiptronic-type lever there's so much delay built into the thing while the engine controls back out timing, etc. to smooth the shift that it just flat doesn't work.
When you step on the gas hard enough to move your foot 3/4in on the pedal, the transmission should be down a gear and ready to go by the time your foot has reached where it's going, you should not have to wait for the thing to make up its mind, while you push further and further trying to get the SOB to kick down and eventually get disgusted and just stomp the friggin' gas through the floor (at which point it lurches into a two-gear downshift and lunges toward the rev limiter) which is what it takes on some BMWs.
When you nudge the lever or button the gear change should happen by the time your hand is off the control, not a deliberate 7/10 of a second later like it does in most 'Tiptronic/Steptronic' Audis and BMWs and etc. Driving one of those cars (like the '02 Audi S6 kidmobile out in the driveway) is like driving a laggy turbo - you have to do everything a little in advance, guess where you're going to want an upshift or downshift well in advance and submit the request so that the ECU can forward it to Munich or Ingolstadt for approval before acting upon it.
The hardware is physically capable of proper behavior, it's the engineers doing the setup who don't have the mindset for it.
Take, for instance, the old E36 M3 automatic (yes, they built 'em, and they worked pretty well) vs an E36 328i of the same year with the same basic gearbag. The M3 clicked off clean, smooth upshifts and downshifts on command, with foot-induced downshifts happening quickly with no delay. By contrast, getting the 328i to do anything useful was an exercise in futility.
