Quote:
Originally Posted by pothole
Yeah, I think it's you who doesn't understand how PDK works.
You do realise that when you move that "stick" all you are doing is sending a signal to a computer. Nothing you manually manipulate is of any consequence. You may as well be pressing a small button.
In a manual gearbox, it's the movement of your hand directly connected to mechanisms that deselects one gear and selects another. Same for the clutch, albeit the physical connection is hydraulic.
There is nothing manual about PDK. You press a button, a signal is sent to a computer, it decides what to do. And then it does it.
PDK does not allow for manual changes. It does the changes.
Get it, now?
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I get it now no more or less than I did before. Whether the control action is initiated by moving a stick that is attached to a gear box, moving a stick that is attached to electronics that are attached to a gear box, or pushing a button that is attached to a gearbox, the point of "manual control" is this: when you tell the gearbox to do something, it does it, when I say, how I say. If the computer would rather be in 4th and I'd like to be in 6th, I win. It does what I say, immediately. That's manual control. Both by the linguistics definition of the word (as I pointed out so elequently above) and by the notional definition long affixed by automotive junkies such as your- and myself. This is why even though you could "control" a Tiptronic with buttons or a stick, it wasn't a manual -- it took your "suggestion" and eventually got around to going to that gear as long as it didn't really think you shouldn't be there.
I can put my house thermostat on automatic and let it do what it needs to, or I can switch it to manual and take control of the temperature -- all with the same set of buttons talking to the same logic board. I don't have to go down to the furnace room and shovel coal for it to be manual control of the temperature in my house.
And on the opposite side of the spectrum, I have a 68 Cadillac convertible with an automatic TH 400 transmission. There is not the first sign of a logic board or even of a wire going into that transmission. Nothing between me and the transmission that's not mechanical. I can shift it manually with a stick that comes out of the steering wheel -- no buttons. But this does not a manual transmission make. It is an automatic NOT because it has an electronic interface between me and it, but because it doesn't shift with precision, delivering the gear I order up immediately upon my ordering it.
Cheers!