Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transmissions

Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by computator on Thursday November 17, 2016 @05:04AM (#12976058)

> because of Physics, an automatic transmission will always be less efficient

You making that claim based on how automatic transmissions currently work, right? And not on every way they could work.

Purely from logic, your claim has to be false: Imagine a humanoid robot sitting in your driver's seat, driving your manual transmission car, its robot arm doing the shifting exactly as a human would. Your manual car has been turned into an automatic and it is not less efficient.

I suppose you could argue that the robot, being part of the car, has an energy requirement. I would then argue that we could shrink the humanoid robot down to the size of chip with sensor inputs, and replace the robot arm and gear shift with a solenoid or whatever, thereby saving considerable energy.

By this thought experiment alone, I don't see how anyone can make a statement about automatics always being less efficient.

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by Aaargh20318 on Thursday November 17, 2016 @05:57AM (#12976294)

> Purely from logic, your claim has to be false: Imagine a humanoid robot sitting in your driver's seat, driving your manual transmission car, its robot arm doing the shifting exactly as a human would. Your manual car has been turned into an automatic and it is not less efficient.

You're forgetting a very important factor: the automatic transmission can only respond to the drivers actions. Unlike the driver it has no knowledge of future plans. It will happily shift up 2 seconds before I hit the brakes because it has no idea I'm planning to take a left turn in 20 meters.

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by kps on Thursday November 17, 2016 @10:16AM (#12978102)

  > It will happily shift up 2 seconds before I hit the brakes because
  > it has no idea I'm planning to take a left turn in 20 meters.

Purely hypothetically, a car could be fitted with an operator control to convey that sort of intent. It could be something the driver could operate without taking their hands off the wheel — perhaps a stick on the left of the steering column?

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by fnj on Thursday November 17, 2016 @01:59PM (#12980290)

You already have one of those. If you are driving a 4-speed automatic, you can see that you are in 3rd and sense that it might be about to upshift and a turn is coming up, you can whip it from D to 3 to hold it in 3rd for the duration.

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by beeglebug on Thursday November 17, 2016 @07:03AM (#12976654)

A lot of cars today are probably more aware of what is going to happen in 20 meters than the driver is.

Surely the same data that is used for automatic braking, lane assist etc could be used to improve timings on automatic gear shifts?

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by Aaargh20318 on Thursday November 17, 2016 @07:51AM (#12976987)

> Surely the same data that is used for automatic braking, lane assist etc could be used to improve timings on automatic gear shifts?

I don't think that data is very useful in city driving where most of the shifting happens. No radar or lane detector can detect my intention of taking the next exit on the left.

That being said, I remember reading a piece a while back about a car manufacturer working on linking the car's navigation/GPS to the automatic transmission. So as long as you enter the destination in the GPS it can make more informed decisions.

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by IshKebab on Thursday November 17, 2016 @05:33AM (#12976176)

You're just repeating what he said. A dual clutch automatic can be more efficient, but the more common torque converter type won't be.

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by caf on Thursday November 17, 2016 @05:31AM (#12976174)

"automatic transmission" is usually taken to specifically mean a torque-converter based hydraulic transmission, rather than a general class of self-shifting transmissions. I'm sure that's the sense in which the parent comment to yours meant it.

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by klagermkii on Thursday November 17, 2016 @05:33AM (#12976183)

What you describe already exists but it doesn't get called "automatic". The car companies don't call it that, the drivers don't call it that. It'll be called DCT or the older sequential manual gearbox.

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Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm... by petercooper on Thursday November 17, 2016 @07:27AM (#12976815)

Correct. It's basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-automatic_transmission .. implementations vary in quality but on high end cars, tends to be extremely nice to use.

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