On The Proliferation of Extraneous Gears

Pictured: ZF's 8-speed Automatic for BMW's, about to be "old hat."

Luddite.  The term originated from England during the industrial revolution in the early 1800's.  Luddites went out at night, destroying wide-frame fabric looms that were taking away the jobs of skilled textile workers.  It was a man-against-machine revolution that got to the point of military intervention.  Technology was minimizing their usefulness in society, so the solution was to destroy the technology.  A noble fight, but today the term Luddite has been boiled down to mean someone not fond of technological advances.

I am not a Luddite.  There's plenty of technology I'm fond of.  I like fuel injection.  I even like direct injection in some forms, particularly Toyota's D4S direct and port system.  Twin-clutch automated manuals are cool.  Of course turbocharging is.  I can even occasionally get along with traction control, flappy paddle gearboxes, heated seats, and satnav systems.  But sometimes it's pretty clear that a line is being crossed, and that line is technology for the sake of the marketing department.

The 2013 Dodge Dart:  Grab Life By The 9-speed Auto.  More Gears Than You Can Handle!!11!!11oneeleventyone!!%$^^*

Two days ago, I showed you some CGI renderings and a few details about the upcoming 2013 Dodge Dart.  It turns out, there's another detail that ol' Sergio Marchionne left out.  While the Dart will likely ship with a Fiat 6-speed twin clutch when it launches, later on it will house a ZF 9-speed automatic transmission.  That will make it the first production car with 9 forward gears, and you have to wonder - what's the point?

Well, the point is clear for Fiatsler:  as soon as the company can build a car that gets an unadjusted 40mpg combined, Fiat can buy the remaining 5% of Chrysler from the federal government, giving them a 58.5% share in the former-failing, now-selling company.  I don't mind this at all.  Before Fiat came into the game, Chrysler's vehicles were some of the least desirable, least efficient, most poorly-built automobiles in America.  (Well, except for the Chevy Aveo.  Thanks, GM-Daewoo!)  They're quickly turning that around now, and I applaud them.

As long as they put the Caliber out of it's friggin' misery, I don't care if it's replacement has 14 gears.  Blech.

But really, how much of the decision to fit a 9-speed automatic to the Dart was driven by the engineering department, and how much of it was a result of the marketing department?  Dodge says the 9-speed automatic offers between 10-16% better efficiency than a conventional six-speed automatic, but I find that rather hard to believe.  Considering that the current Honda Civic HF has 138 horsepower, and gets 41mpg with an "old-school" 5-speed automatic, what are those other 4 gears doing?

"Honda is behind the times," they say.  "Only 5 gears?  And port injection?"  Let's look at the ends, not the means, guys.  Civic HF pictured.

I'll tell you what they'll be doing:  they'll be swapping back and forth on a flat stretch of road.  They'll be annoying.  9 gear is going to get on your nerves, in the same way that a bike with 3 chainrings and a 9-speed cassette has 27 gears, but you can never find the right one, because you're always swapping between them.  Lexus apparently kept the 6-speed automatic in the brand-new GS350 because according to test drivers, prototypes fitted with the LS's 8-speed auto spent too much time hunting for the right gear.  And the Lexus has a torquey, dual-injected 3.5L 306bhp V6.  The Dart is going to come with a variety of small displacement four-cylinder engines that will all be light on torque, with the possible exception of the 2.4L.  Less torque equals more sensitivity to gearing.  This is why a Bentley Turbo R can get away with a GM TH400 3-speed automatic: it's got 500lb-ft of torque below 2,000 rpm, it doesn't matter what gear you're in.  This is also why they never made an S2000 with a 4-speed automatic: it would be terrible.  It's why the 2.0L WRX with a 4-speed automatic is terrible, come to think of it.

"9 gears?  Old chap, I have 752lb-ft of torque at 1,800rpms.  I can get by with 2 gears.  Pfft.  Fish 'n chips."

The other issue is the law of diminishing returns for additional gears.  After all, you can keep adding on gears, but you can't really keep making them deeper and deeper.  If Mopar is just stacking numerically lower and lower overdrive ratios on top of a 6-speed box, it won't work.  A 1.4L engine is really going to struggle to keep a 3,200lb vehicle (just guessing) moving along comfortable at 1,300rpm's.  This is why Honda's Fit is geared so short - it has a small engine, if it had a long final drive ratio it wouldn't be making enough power in top gear to comfortably stay at highway speed.  That's why it buzzes along near 4,000 rpm while cruising.  So unless you have a 6.0L V8 under the hood, or something large and turbocharged, you can't just get extra fuel economy from adding deeper gears, because the lack of power at that RPM will force the car to compensate with more throttle opening, more fuel, more timing: less economy.  So what they're doing is stacking these ratios closer, keeping the top gear about the same as in transmissions with less gears, and making the gaps between the other gears smaller.  In theory, they should just bin the planetary automatic and make a CVT that doesn't suck if that's what they want to do.  CVT's have infinite gears in a defined spread, but people rightfully (thanks Saturn!) don't trust them.  With each additional gear you add, expense goes up but benefit decreases.  The difference in gearing peaks between a 4 and a 5-speed auto is noticeable.  The difference between 8 gears and 9?  Come on.  How many "average joe" consumers actually know how many gears are in their box anyway?  Ford doesn't even bother to include choices on their automatics any more, giving you "P R N D L."

What does the "L" stand for when you have 6 gears, by the way?

More likely, it was a small part "well, another gear will give us a few more MPG's" and it was 90% "Hey, if we have a 9-speed automatic, that's something we can brag about in our ads that none of our competitors can.  Yet.  Until Toyota comes up with a 5-speed auto with a 2-speed transfer case or something.  We'll sell a bunch of these.  It'll be great."  After all, Marketing is the reason that most performance car ads focus on horsepower, instead of torque.  Horsepower sells cars, torque wins races.  And tows trailers.  And does burnouts.  But that's Marketing, and I'm not a marketing guy, and if it helps Chrysler sell more cars then great.

I'll be honest, this is how I prefer to be marketed to.

But beyond the annoyance of the car switching between gears 7, 8, and 9 on a flat road, and the pointlessness of 9 gears on a small engine, and the law of diminishing returns, and the argument of engineering versus marketing we get to the real issue.  Would you want to own a Chrysler that has 9 freaking gears?  I think a bus pass would be a better guarantee of reliability than a Chrysler 9-speed transaxle.  I'm not a Luddite, but I am a professional cynic, and let's be cynical: Chrysler does not have the best reputation for building reliable automatic transmissions.  How often do you see ChryCo minivans for sale with busted or slipping automatics?  Dakota/Durangos or Rams with a failed 3rd gear valve body?  But hey, this 9-speed is being made by ZF, right?  Well, in South Carolina.  Even if we put aside my prejudice against Chrysler's automatics (which is admittedly difficult), look at it this way:  except for the engine, the transmission is the single most complicated and expensive component in a car.  If you have a car with 100k miles and the transmission goes out, that is usually the point at which it goes to auction or the junk yard.  (Or on craiglist with a note "might need trans work.")  A new or rebuilt transmission can sometimes match or exceed the cost of a less than ten-year-old car.  It's one of those "planned obsolescence" features that help manufacturers keep their profits up.  And the more stuff they cram into a compact transaxle (such as nine gears, or two clutches) generally speaking, the less reliable it is.

VW's 7-speed DSG.  Look at all those tiny parts waiting to break!

So while some autojournos will continue to make fun of the Civic for only having a 5-speed auto, I'll continue to point out that it gets 41mpg highway with one battery and 5 gears, and they don't break.  I think the Dart will be a good product (considering it's based on an Alfa Romeo, it'll probably be fun to drive), but you can put me on the wary side of this equation.  More is more, but can we start making sure that the engineering companies do has a point before they spend the money doing it?

Manuals aren't immune either, apparently.  Porsche is introducing the world's first seven-speed manual in the new 911, sure to confuse many an old banker.  And let's not forget Mitsubishi's "Twin Stick" 4x2 manual in the 80's Colt, a 4-speed manual with an electronic 2-speed transfer case, giving you eight gears.  Before they introduced the 6-speed manual to the Corvette, the C4 had a 4-speed manual with an electronic overdrive on gears 2-4 as well, which was a major reliability issue.  But once you get past 6 gears, being able to make a comprehensible gear pattern becomes an issue.

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic.  Drop a comment in the box below.  Is more gears better?  Or would you prefer everything came with a bellhousing compatible with a 2-speed powerglide?