Corner an engineer and they’ll admit the ratio race is spiralling out of control, says Tim Pollard
One-upmanship is a dangerous game – and one that’s distorting the cars we end up buying. We’ve already seen a horsepower war among German car companies – and now the numbers game is spreading to the world of transmissions. Don’t believe me? We’re seeing a steady trickle of cars sporting eight gears. First was the Lexus LS, and now the Audi A5 will offer a CVT programmed with eight, pre-programmed ‘ratios’.
We don’t need eight gears, do we? I mean, when did you last drive a Mercedes and think to yourself, ‘damn – I simply must have an eighth cog, just to lower the noise by 0.25 decibels’? Exactly. You don’t. It’s only seven years since the last Mini was sold with only four gears, but six is rapidly becoming the norm and seven is sooo last year. Where will it all end?
It gets worse. I recently spoke to the engineering boss of Audi’s new A5 coupe and asked him why that car had an eight-speed Multitronic CVT option. ‘The typical customer likes it,’ admitted Stefan Härdl. ‘It feels much more dynamic.’ There’s no engineering reason for eight speeds – it’s just that your typical buyer enjoys the arcade-game sensation of button-shifting through the gears like an F1 driver.
Härdl admitted that the ideal solution would be to set the A5’s CVT in its natural, adaptive mode, so the motor works at maximum power or torque under load, rather than whizzing up through eight pre-determined ‘ratios’. But that wouldn’t be so cool would it?