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Re: A4 lacks performance
On Sat, 3 Feb 1996 ScharfR@aol.com wrote:
> The A4 automatic transmission (and all other Audi automatics for 1996) has a
> range of shift strategies - over 200 in fact.
i hope that 1st gear is low enough to overcome the traditional quattro
drive train inertia.. with 5 ratios one would like to expect good choices.
i tend to be skeptical of silicon that tries to outsmart humans. these
devices react to inputs. they do not have any forecasting ability.
for an extreme example of a complete failure of implementation,
check out mitsubishi's "fuzzy logic" slushbox in the eclipse.
my v8 with its upgraded slush software has some of these "smarts". if
i put my foot down hard it will deduce that i want to go hard and will
hold on to lower gears, even if i lift off completely for a few seconds.
(all this in "E" mode, btw, "S" mode has become completely redundant)
this is great if i'm tearing up the curves and such, but it gets it
all wrong if all i want to do is to accelerate up to freeway speeds
from an on ramp... a few seconds of hard acceleration was all that
was needed and it needed time to step back down into econ mode....
the biggest sin they committed with the a4 slushbox is to take away
the zig zag gate. that, IMO was the single best feature of audi's
slushbox implementation. that and the "M" mode is really what should
be provided rather than over ambitious software. if the a8 has a
tiptronic style gate, so should the a4.. one of those american cars is
featuring them now, i think that audi should do likewise and dump the
chips that really don't have a chance through no fault of theirs.
and torque convertor lockup in more gears would be nice too...
i guess it's possible that with lots of scenarios programmed in
they can cover most of the possibilities, but fundamentally it
is reactive, so it would always be possible to fool it.
eliot