Mick Moignard's Blog

3 weeks ago I traded in my 3-year-old Golf GTI for a new one; same model, same colour (red) but with leather seats as that's how they come now, and the DSG gearbox.  This is the VW automated manual gearbox - two clutches, almost instantaneous gear changes, steering wheel paddles, the full boy-racer stuff.    I'd heard good stories about how the DSG GTI is faster than the manual - because the changes are so fast, and so on.    I test-drove one before I ordered my new car, and I liked it.  But now I like it a lot more - and so does Nikki, who really didn't expect to.  

You could say that it's basically a clever automatic with manual override.  But, crucially, as it has no torque converter, the engine speed, like a manual, is dependant on the gear you are in and the road speed.   It has two automatic modes; regular D mode, and S mode.  S mode expects full-throttle work all the time, and changes at the redline. D mode is more sedate, but on fill throttle still changes up at pretty high engine speeds.  In both cases you can use the paddles to force an gear change - so long as the software thinks that its safe to make the change.  Which means that even in auto mode, you can fly into a corner on full brakes, change down 2 or 3 gears as you go, and be at the apex in the right gear to get out of the corner quickly, and with no hands off the wheel.    It then changes back to auto mode when it thinks its safe to do so.    The idea of the two clutches and 3 shafts is that as you accelerate or decelerate it can set up the next change that it expects you need on the other shaft, so when it's time for the change, it's ready and pre-engaged, so it just needs one clutch to open and the other to close.   You do see that a shift in a direction it doesn't expect takes a little longer.  

Manual mode works off the paddles; right for up and left for down; and it leaves it up to you unless you ask it to do something silly; it won;t allow a 5 to 6 change at under about 33mph, for example, and if you brake to a stand from 6th, you see it change down each gear as it needs to.  Give it throttle at 35mph in 6th, and it may well change by itself to 3rd or 4th.  And you get regular manual-transmission engine braking too, useful for going down hills and so on.

I'm hooked, which I didn't expect to be saying. I've driven old-fashioned automatics, mostly US hire cars, where pressing the gas pedal hard results in more noise for a second or two before anything else happens.  In this thing, it reacts like a manual - it just goes.  And the gas mileage,  if you leave it in D, is about 5-7% better than the old car when driven in a similar manner.  Drive it in manual mode, where you make most but not all the gear decisions, and the gas mileage comes down to the same as the manual, which I think I'd expect.
 
I hate to say this, coming from a country where we expect to drive manuals, and automatics are regarded as motorway barge-mobiles, but I think that this is the future of high-performance cars, especially back-lane blasters which the GTI basically is.  Given that VW group made the 1000bhp Bugatti Veyron available only with the DSG gearbox, I suspect I'm not alone in thinking that.