Quote:
Originally Posted by Frank Lee
The Coupe has a 5-speed m/t and most of the time I skip one or two gears. With a six or seven speed I would skip three or four gears plus be powering all those extra gear meshes 100% of the time. :/
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I skip gears on my 5-MT too but I loaf around in 3rd and 4th when I can't get past 20mph. On the highway I can't use 2nd to accelerate, so it's 3rd or 4th if I need some extra power, but 4th is kind of useless on the highway and 3rd doesn't have much grunt.
Admittedly though, the spacing in this gearbox could be better. If 3 were closer to 2 it'd be a lot more useful, and if 5 were significantly taller than 4 that would be a lot better too. But add an extra gear like in the C60, with slightly taller final drive, you now get a shorter 1st (good for the clutch), a much shorter 2nd (good for low speed acceleration, don't need to use 1 to do as much acceleration), a versatile 3rd, 4/5 for more power on the highway and rolling around at low speed, and 6 for cruising, at the cost of 10 pounds of weight and one more gear mesh. I think that's worth it.
7 is sort of hard to justify even with a 8500rpm 2ZZ or a K24/2AR-FE now that I think about it. However if you look at Porsche's 3.4L 6MT for example, the gearing is fairly standard for a 6MT in terms of spacing of gear ratios but they use a tall final drive. Those cars turn 3000rpm at 75mph, which sucks, and everyone complains about the final drive being too tall since gears 1 and 2 are so tall. Here 7 speed makes a lot of sense, 7th would be a highway only gear, and 1-6 would be your acceleration gears which is necessary on a car that can do 180mph.