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Old 10-15-2010, 10:58 AM   #20 (permalink)
basjoos
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Upstate SC
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Aerocivic - '92 Honda Civic CX
Last 3: 70.54 mpg (US)

AerocivicLB - '92 Honda Civic CX
Team Honda
90 day: 55.14 mpg (US)

Camryglide - '20 Toyota Camry hybrid LE
90 day: 65.83 mpg (US)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tjts1 View Post
Nobody would want to buy a car like that. Try driving a double clutch gear box some time. A human being will never shift the way this thing does. The shifts happen much faster and much more often. It'll accelerate in third and immediately jump up to 5th or 6th as you start lifting off the gas. decelerate down to a stop and it'll keep the trans in 6th gear the whole way to minimize revs with the injectors turned off. Basically any time you're not accelerating or climbing a hill, you are in 5th or 6th gear no matter how slow you're going. Since the shifts happen so much slower it would be a waste of time for a human to try to mimic its behavior. Instead they would be frustrated by the overly tall gears. I encourage anyone to drive one of these. Its very different from any automatic I've seen. My experience was in a VW with a very similar double clutch box.
The Chevy Cruze comes with a either a 6 speed manual or a 6 speed dual clutch automatic, both with the same gear ratios and the manual gets 4 mpg better city and 1 mpg better highway mileage. From your description above, the dual clutch automatic goes into 6 gear engine braking whenever you let up on the throttle rather than the no drag freewheel that's available with just the touch of the clutch pedal on the manual. And with freewheel easily tapped, it is a lot easier to hypermile your way to even greater mileages than the EPA stickers would show. They've sold a lot of manual Cruzes overseas, so it must be enjoyable to drive.

I have very tall gears on my manual Honda Civic CX and manual Ford F150 and have no problems or frustration driving them.
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Allch Chcar (10-25-2010), kgwedi (10-15-2010), PaleMelanesian (10-28-2010)