Oh – also, there’s this thing called driveline loss – manuals lose less power to the wheels through their transmission – thus manuals put more power to the pavement.

And finally, I’ve driven the VW DSG and I’ve raced the VW DSG – I can shift faster than it can, given the proper stick (S2000/Civic SI).

A person driving a stick, with the ridiculous usage of all the arms and legs, strikes me as Rube Goldbergian. You can do it faster and easier, but you don’t because you need by all the motion to feel like something’s being done. It’s like being impressed that someone can rub their tummy and pat their head at the same time. Utterly useless.

Porsche (like VW with the GTI) is not asking you to choose between manual and DSG. They used to have one good transmission option and one bad one; now they’re going to have two good ones. We should all be cheering, dammit!

Suck it up and quit making excuses. Its not as bad as you make it out to be.

oh – and consider the expense of fixing them – the standard repair operation is to simply throw out the old unit, purchase a brand new one, and reinstall it (~$5000 when your tranny goes).

Honestly – DSGs have evolved because more and more rich people don’t know how to drive a stick and don’t want to be embarassed, and the automakers want to capture them and sell them cars.

You know, another way to get shifts much faster than the human hand to get that top speed is Launch Control. I hear Nissan’s making a new, even better gadget than that: You sit in the passenger seat, press a button on the dash, and the car takes off and shifts by itself. It’s really the best way to get the top 0-60 time (on a closed track, of course). It’s totally worth it, I mean you get that race-car experience of driving a car fast, without having to learn anything. The American Dream.

In all seriousness, though… non manual = no, for me.

R.I.P.

Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work like that. Whatever driving benefits are garnered from standard transmissions are quickly lost when traffic catches up. A DSG offers 90% of the involvement without any of the downsides – it’s just a superior transmission and flapping the paddles on a GTI is a lot of fun. Plus, even if you don’t care about this stuff: it does shift better and faster than any human could (though of course, you can say this about many normal automatics as well).

(And yeah, I’m worried about reliability issues and how they’ll hold up on long-term too but at this point it’s just speculation without evidence.)

Also, I too would not want to own a paddle shift gearbox 10 years from now, and wonder if they will affect long-term values…

I’m with you.

Besides, can you drop from 4th to 2nd coming into a hard turn and kick into a 4 wheel slide with a dsg*?

*on a closed course only…

CarShark :
But with the flappy paddles, aren’t you still controlling when the gears change? The whole argument against sounds like grasping at straws.

Simply put, yes. But driving a manual transmission isn’t all about just changing gears on demand. That’s what tiptronic is for. It’s about the feeling of the control you have over the car. Just can’t beat using all four limbs to pilot a vehicle. Call me stone-age if ya want, but damn do I love it. You can’t feel any more connected to a car than that. Since I use my car almost every single day of the year, I want to be as connected with it as possible (within reason, of course).

I think of it this way:
Would you flappy paddle-supporters enjoy a car as much if it’s steering/road feel was numbed? I wouldn’t think so. I wouldn’t want my transmission to get a dose of morphine either.

Pass.

< /personal opinion>

We’ve all been there.