DSG and CVT
 

It seems that companies are trying to push automatics on people these days. Having lived in Japan and America, I can only imagine that their target market is Europe, as most people there prefer manuals (at least compared to the states and japan).

DSG, as I understand it, is a VW-owned technology. I personally find the premise to be quite interesting. They are claiming that it will increase FE, but my question is, how much? I like that it is able to disengage both clutchces when the car is travelling down a hill. If they were to integrate a way to kill (turn off) the engine in some fashion, this could be a really good technology to encourage better FE in vehicles.

CVT, on the other hand, seems to be used by many different companies. Toyota is pushing it in Japan now, and at least according to the 10/15 mode test, it IS working. A Daihatsu Mira equipped with CVT just got rated at 27km/l... with the other setups ranging from 21-25.5. This is enough to peak my interest. Then again, CVT has been around for years, and is just finally making a real breakthrough in the auto industry. This makes me think that there is a reason that it took so long to catch on. Could be that the fuel savings just didn't make up for the increased technology cost... I don't know.

That being said, I still love my manuals. It just makes driving that much more fun. Having new choices is nice though, and they will surely help out our less hard-core drivers easily achieve better FE.

DSG is the tech VW uses - but it's not the only semi automatic gearbox out there :p I think VW doesn't own it -- but they own a license to use it... I would classify DSG more on the slushbox side as it's not a dry clutch system (much like a slushbox clutch pack)... 8ms shift times are nice though :p

As for the CVT.... Didn't Da Vinci sketch a concept for a CVT - you know, back in the 15th century :p

i would not call the dsg or the smg a slush box. i also would not consider them more fuel efficient or semi automatic.

there are a lot of other semi automatic transmissions out there that are complete garbage. only audi/vw(dsg) and bmw(smg) make the good ones. for anyone that is a real driving enthusiast, please test drive a car with dsg or smg before putting it into the same category as the other manumatics. you will be happy you did. :)

cvt is another issue.... i am not into it, but, in theory, it definitely is a good setup for fuel economy.