And Ferrari’s Valeo system. Two pedals and a gated shifter make my mind hurt. Mostly installed on the Mondial, but it made it to a few others.
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For a while around 1990 we owned a couple of VW Jetta diesels. Our daughters that it was funny that most boys did not know how to drive a four in the floor.
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Also only had only 2 pedals, and, unlike those I mentioned, no “Fully automatic” mode; you always had to shift, just didn’t have to pedal the clutch.
They were an interesting drive…
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There was a retrofit kit that was made in South Korea some time in the early 2000s that converted any manual transmission to an automatic clutch activated by a shifter mounted switch. I didn’t get the opportunity to drive it but a friend who had it installed swears by it. It replaced the left leg with some sort of actuator that operated the clutch.
Are DCTs still around or have the issues with them at VW & Ford killed them?
There are still enough models available with them, except less people are buying them opting for the automatics instead.
Pretty well all “supercars” use them.
The only thing Ford, et. al. did was kill off the DCT in the compact range in the USA. They’re still going strong world-wide.
Now, instead, in the USA, we’re going full-tilt CVT, although the “traditional” automatics are making an effort by adding another gearset or 2 (for 6+ gears), the merits of either and whether these are “improvements” over the DCT being debatable…
That’s what I was thinking. So, they are are effectively dead, since the vehicles they come on aren’t really mass market models or see many miles like “regular” cars.
Here’s a good article on it, although a few years old. Interesting use of words from many people in the article. 
P.S. This is interesting
I recall the Fusion having a 6-speed DCT as the sole option in 2017 all trims, but I’ve slept since then and looks like there’s not going to be a Fusion in 2019.
Rented a Corolla several years ago with 6 gears. Had about 90% less suck than even my old Integra, which was mighty tolerable.
The phrase “fake news” hits pretty well for these words:
Dual-clutch transmissions “have taken a beating among consumers,” said IHS researcher David Petrovski.
“If people aren’t used to it, they think something is wrong.”
and
Sales personnel at Village Ford in Dearborn, Mich., took the company’s advice to heart, said Bob Wheat, the dealership’s sales manager.
“If customers are prepared for it and understand it, then they have no issues,” Wheat said. “People who haven’t driven a manual transmission expect the car to be smooth as silk, so we have to set the right expectation level.”
Maybe it’s just me, but to me, the consumers were standing at the top of the tallest mountain they could find, shouting their discontent with real problems, and all the automotive industry heard was crybabies who “aren’t used to manual shifts”. This is likely because I had a family member with this very problem. This particular family member traditionally drives manual transmissions (along with a plethora of automatics, too), and had done for 50 years before buying the vehicle in question . At 40+mph the vehicle would grind, crunch, lose speed, shudder, and then carry on as if nothing happened (at least, it never actually locked up the drive wheels prior to his unloading this POS on a trade in). This was not “something to get used to” unless you subscribe to the Clayton Williams Theory of Things™. Further, this particular family member had tales to be told from passengers who also are well-acclimatized manual transmission devotees corroborating this as “anything but normal” and “downright scary”. Yet, all the manufacturer heard was “the crybaby doesn’t like a little noise and shudder when pulling away from a stop because they’re just not used to anything but automatic smoothness”.
Assholes.
Where was I?
OH yeah.
I think it had more to do with the industry’s unwillingness to listen to customers and actually try to address the problems than it did with the technology or “Softie Americans” being unwilling to accept it.
Honestly, I presumed, based on the way that article is written, that “Automotive News” would be a Euro-publication. I was surprised it is not. It’s out of Detroit. Owned by an American company. But then, it’s the mouthpiece for the American manufactures, so it towed the line…assholes.
Yeah yeah. Hybrid’s the cure for everything…
I am admittedly a novice when it comes to cars, but isn’t hydrogen kind of the way we need to go? I always figured the flaws in hybrids outweighed the benefits.
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Opinions are like assholes…
I’ll show you mine regarding hydrogen:
IF hydrogen were not so difficult to obtain/distribute, it might be part of “the answer”, but we’ve been chasing that dragon for a long, long time… (fun facts: Francois Isaac de Rivaz is often credited with inventing and constructing the first successful internal combustion engine in 1806. The engine was powered by a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen. 1 year later, he also placed said engine into an ‘automobile’).
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VW still sells manual transmissions in their cars. My 2012 Jetta TDI and my 2016 Golf GTI are both 6 speed manuals.
They also have their DSG which is a two clutch automatic, that they sell with paddle shifters and it’s interesting as well.
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I’m of the camp that the electric motor should have two gears. Something equivalent to the 1st and 4th in the gas world. Of the electrics I’ve driven (Tesla excluded) they seem to have amazing low end torque and starting power, but accelerating from 50 to 70 to merge onto a highway is terrible.
The purple people eater was out back this weekend…
Upsides of hydrogen:
- Produces water vapor as its combustion byproduct
Downsides of hydrogen:
- Expensive to produce
- Once produced, significant additional energy must be expended to compress or liquefy it for storage
- Polluting to produce : Electrolysis powered by solar and wind might be the hand-wavey way that promoters insist it’s going to be made, but the reality is that steam reformation of hydrocarbons is how it will be made in volume since that’s slightly more energy-efficient and the petroleum industry can gear up for a fraction of what industrial hydrolysis setups will cost; these setups dump waste CO2 into the atmosphere
- Low-ish energy density using both present and foreseeable future storage methods
- Hard to contain - not only can hydrogen leak through the best gas seals, but it can also diffuse through steel; leakage is an accepted fact of life when storing H2
- Explosive across an incredible range of atmospheric concentrations, flammable across almost any range, and far far easier to ignite than gasoline
- Fuel cells have cost, lifespan, and a range of operational issues that haven’t been remedied; they’re also ~half as efficient as batteries
- One could bypass fuel cells by simply running a conventional engine on hydrogen, but at that point you might as well just run the vehicle on cheaper, easier-to-manage natural gas
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I call it “Who cares what the customers think, we need a real world test data to prove that this works and we need a scapegoat answer when it doesn’t work.”
The last Corolla I drove as in 2014 and I had a pretty good CVT in it. Much better than the any other CVT from other Japanese makes at the time. The one on the current Prius, does not feel as good. It(Prius CVT) feels like it’s “disengaging” and re-engaging with a noticeable amount of shift shock.
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Energy density looks like a hard problem to solve. Li-Ion is running out of headroom for improvement. We’ve likely all heard about various lab advances (remember Cambridge Crude a few years back) and venture capitalist bait (EEStor) but that needle doesn’t move quickly. Li-Ion glass is the latest thing that the tech press has been going on about that supposedly bumps both energy density and lifespan, but that vapor has yet to, uhm, condense.
For most EV drivers, time-to-refill is solved via overnight charging since they’re daily driver commuting cars. Doesn’t fit every use case, but EV’s can’t be everything to everyone and I can’t take anyone who insists otherwise seriously. I’ll admit it’s a bit strange watching Tesla try to shoehorn their vehicles into the long-distance driving role via their fast charging networks; they enable long-distance driving, but taking 30 minutes to charge every 2-3 hours seems like it would require some adjustment to a motoring public accustomed to sustaining something close to highway speeds indefinitely should they desire.
That’s gonna take a good long while.
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Not entirely sure what year the vehicle was; I believe I rented it sometime around 2014. It certainly shifted like it had discrete gears and had an indicator on the dash showing what gear it was in at the time.
I think one of the best responses to the shortcomings of the all-electric have been those in which you use your electric daily, charging overnight, and when you need to make a longer trip than it can handle, you arrange to borrow, free of (additional) charge, an ICE car from said manufacturer (Can’t find a link to such a program right now, but I thought BMW ran it for a bit at the introduction of the i3). Granted it takes planning, but this seems so much more viable than any other responses to date (e.g. Tesla’s efforts to get charging stations everywhere, or the government push to put charging stations in every parking spot in the city, etc.) But I guess, when you’re Elon Musk, bullying the government into fining the shyte out of VW and putting that money into “electric infrastructure” is easier than actually trying to come up with viable-today options…
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I’ve been back in my gasoline burning car for a few days and was thinking about the trade off in time.
I probably spend an extra ~10 seconds of my day, every day, plugging in the electric, vs ~10 minutes every other week (or so) to fill up my gas car. Not exactly sure what i’m doing with the extra ~33 seconds/day, but it is a time savings for sure.
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