dragontamer ,

I’ve seen manual Fords with a little trick where it holds the revs at the speed for the next gear up, just for a second or so, to make it easier to get a perfect gear change. However, even then an automatic is far better for maintaining acceleration, and therefore more accelerating more efficiently.

0-60 drag races are not a common use case in daily driving. You gear shift to 2nd before making a 15mph turn. You downshift to 3rd when entering a 25mph zone. You shift to 5th (or whatever your last gear is) as you enter the highway.

Otherwise, you're rarely touching the clutch or gearbox. Sure, a 0-60 hits all gears and requires 5 shifts to be done smoothly, but that's rare.


Because I'm a human, and I can see the road... I can see that the ~15mph turn is coming up. So I can be already in 2nd gear before the turn comes up. This is useful for engine braking anyway. Then I'm in the correct gear for the turn, and out of the turn. Hitting the proper gear long-before the automatic (DCT, Wet-clutch, or CVT) would ever know about the turn.

This is not an aggressive turn for racing. Racing would likely require heel-toe, a difficult maneuver as I've described above. But for daily driving, just predicting "where the car will be" in 10 seconds and getting the gear shifts done ahead of time is really what you're doing. If you'll be in 2nd gear soon, might as well get that over with and shift slightly before its needed (5 seconds or so ahead).

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