Confused by high- tech dual- clutch? You’re not alone
‘ Improvements’ not so automatic for the people
The people have spoken. In fact, they have complained, they have groused and they have muttered. A few — if my reading of carcomplaints.com is anything to go by — are even in high dudgeon. Their cars are letting them down, say studies by J. D. Power and Consumer Reports, proof that modern high- tech cars are not “built like they used to be.”
Unfortunately, they are wrong.
For the first time in anyone’s memory, J. D. Power is reporting that the dependability of threeyearold cars has declined. It reverses a 15- year trend that has seen the entire industry pull up its socks and build the most reliable cars in automotive history. Yes, even Land Rover — for you skeptics ready to vent about your wonky old Discovery.
“Until this year, we have seen a continual improvement in vehicle dependability,” said David Sargent, vice- president of global automotive at J. D. Power. “However, some of the changes that automakers implemented for the 2011 model year have led to a noticeable increase in problems reported.”
What’s unusual is that, along with the usual suspects — those annoying high- tech electronic gadgets you can never shut off and the indecipherable submenus that plague nearly all infotainment systems — the main culprit is the hitherto most dependable item in the automotive parts bin, the transmission. And the worst offender is the technology that Automotive News once called the Next Big Thing: Those dualclutch “manumatic” transmissions that have filtered down from high- tech sports cars all the way to Ford’s lowly Fiesta.
Dual- clutch transmissions ( DCTs) are just part of the revolution happening aft of the flywheel. What was once a straightforward choice between a five- speed manual and fourspeed automatic has become a bewildering array of paddle-shifted continuously variable transmissions ( CVTs) and multispeed automatics ( as many as nine gears now, and when Ford’s 2017 F- 150 goes on sale, 10) that confuse and — according to both J. D. Power and Consumer Reports — annoy the hell out of consumers.
The problem is two- fold. First are the reliability issues.
The five- speed manual and four- speed automatic transmissions of yore might have been long in the tooth, but with age comes wisdom — or at least reliability — and automakers had become remarkably proficient at their fault- free manufacture. Not so much with the newfangled autoboxes. Witness the number of Nissan CVT drive belts that go clank in the night or the Ford DCTs that seem to need constant software updates. Perhaps rushed to market, their technological foibles are real.
Even more prevalent than hard reliability issues, however, are soft complaints — especially with DCTs — that are seriously undermining customer satisfaction. In large part, these complaints are not so much the result of unreliable engineering but poor communication of what these new transmissions are and how they work. You see, no matter what the salesperson in the showroom tells you, the dual- clutch transmission that he or she promises will shift itself is definitely not an automatic. Automated? Absolutely. But definitely not automatic.
A DCT, despite being programmed to shift automatically, is in fact a manual transmission. It has gears like a manual, and even a clutch. Heck, most of them have two clutches. One thing’s for sure, there’s nary a torque converter among them. Essentially, what automakers have done is place a whole bunch of little robots inside a manual transmission to save you the trouble of having to “manually” shift gears or depress said clutch( es).
Why have they gone to the trouble? The main reason is that, all things being equal — number of gears, gear ratios, etc. — the much- maligned manual transmission is still more efficient than a traditional automatic. Transmitting power via two mechanical clutches will always be more efficient than the fluidic connection of a torque converter.
How much more efficient? Well, statistics reveal up to a five per cent improvement over a similarly geared automatic and, in real- world driving, the advantage can be even greater.
The problem is that consumers, promised the equivalent of their traditional automatic transmission, aren’t happy with some of the foibles that come along with automating what was once mechanical. Instead of what should be a nice, squishy- smooth takeoff from a stop sign, they are sometimes subjected to the rapid engagement of, well, a clutch. Ditto shifting gears.
One solution would be for all those princess- and- the- pea consumers to get over themselves. The shifting of even the most supposedly cranky DCTs is hardly abrupt. But, of course, that’s never going to happen; the people never being wrong.
Solutions to this fuel- economy-versus-shift- smoothness conundrum could fall into two categories. First, automakers could take the time to explain that DCTs are not automatics and, more importantly, why that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, automakers are better at engineering than explanation.
More realistically, then, it looks like the solution most manufacturers are choosing is just to increase the number of gears in traditional automatics.
With the seemingly vociferous consumer rejection of DCTs ( and, to a lesser extent, CVTs), we should therefore expect even more gears crammed into our automatics. Don’t be surprised if, in a few years, six- speed automatics are considered as retrograde as a four- speed is today.