why do some automatic cars have a manual mode? What are the advantages and why is it there?
In: Technology
Manuals are active.
Automatics are reactive.
If I am driving and I see a hill, I can downshift into a lower gear before the incline and not have my engine struggle to go up hill.
Same scenario in an automatic, you have to get up the hill, engine can’t maintain speed in the current gear and might kick down to stop from stalling out.
Having the ability to select gears through flappy paddles or some other mechanism let’s someone have the functionality of a manual with the ease of driving in an automatic.
Having more control over your vehicle is never a bad thing.
Automatics are good at guessing the correct gear, but not perfect.
If you’re in snow, you can force a higher gear to cut torque and prevent wheel spin.
If you want better mileage, you can force earlier shifts to keep rpm low and conserve fuel.
If you’re hauling a trailer uphill, you can force a lower gear to keep rpm higher and prevent slow down.
If you’re racing around, you can force later shifts for more acceleration, earlier down shifts for better engine breaking, and hold a gear through a corner to prevent the upset of a shift.
You can take the revs higher than an automatic would normally change gear at, so you can accelerate quicker, and you can use engine braking to help slow down a bit quicker too. And it just generally makes it feel like you’ve got more control.
I’m British and nearly everyone here learns in a manual car to start with, and about half of cars are manual anyway.
Mainly to make people who don’t or are too lazy to drive stick feel like they’re cool. Nothing compares to the experience of driving a manual gearbox once you’ve learned how, it’s like perfect equilibrium, total, gentle control over this 2 ton death machine.
Automatic cars involve using a system that (generally pretty accurately) guesses what gearing it should use, typically involving how hard you’re pressing the accelerator. This is *probably* more computerized than when I learned about it, but my first automatic car had what was called a kick-down linkage, which was in essence a cable that connected to the throttle-body of my engine to my transmission, and if the pedal was pushed down all the way (or past a certain threshold, more accurately), it would pull that cable and tell my transmission to go down a gear so that I could get more acceleration.
But the manual mode or sport mode is there for basically that function: if you know you are going to want more torque or get your engine to higher RPMs for a burst of acceleration (for passing on the highway, for example), you might want to pre-emptively downshift so that you can get that without just flooring the throttle immediately.
That and it’s fun enough that some people will pay extra for a sport mode.
It’s mostly a toy to let people pretend they’re shifting a sports car. A marketing gimmick to help sell vehicle but not a feature used all that much
If youre real adept at rpms and shifting right, you can get better fuel efficiency, also feels like your doing something when accelerating, my automatic has paddle shifters.
It’s useful for when you want to stay in a lower gear, like if driving through snow. It can also just be more fun, when I want to drive fast I tend to go into manual and make the gear changes at higher revs.
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