Quote:
Originally Posted by Old Tele man
That's what I say about California's six-lane "parking lots" during rush hours.
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That's actually the situation when I think having more gears is the most helpful. 2nd gear is too long in my car for crawling sometimes, but 1st feels wasteful running the engine at over 1000rpm doing zero work, and continually modulating the clutch to P&G at 5mph is extremely annoying. Also I commonly find the traffic moving at ~10mph, which is barely inaccessible to 3rd gear. The C60 6 speed transmission would give me 3 gears to crawl in instead of 2.
All that said I do think that excessively close ratio gears are not very useful. "Sporty ratios" often means the ratio between the higher gears is something like 0.85, which is really useless for street driving. Dropping it to a 0.8 ratio is a small loss in power but much more usable. A 25% drop in rpm is a little bothersome for executing the shift but is more practical. My preference is having the rpm go down between 19-22% between all gears except the first 2 and the last 2, and 2nd gear having a lot of grunt so I don't have to use 1st, and that preference is something that can only really be satisfied on a 6+ speed transmission. The Toyota 5 speed used for the 1ZZ has ratios 3.166,1.904,1.392,1.031,0.815, I would prefer the first 4 gears from the C60 and then the 0.725 gear for the 5th. That would be a very usable 5 speed gearbox on the street, but I wouldn't really enjoy driving it if I had more rpm on tap, and the mpg would suck if the engine were higher displacement. Which is why I argued, 6 speeds is kind of necessary.