Quote:
Originally Posted by fflint_18
But I have to be honest and would rather drive a manual (and although I have only been driving for 30 years) I have never thought of it as frustration.
I don't understand your saying a manual is less efficient. Since it's gear to gear everything gets transferred to the wheels. 100%. No auto in the world can claim that. Even a locked torque converter has some loss. Now for bracket racing on a strip an auto is more consistent. No question about it. With a manual, it's all on the driver. They are the ones that cause inefiiciencies in the system.
Sorry for the long message, but you really hit a chord here.
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Didn't mean to 'hit a chord.' I drove manuals off and on from 1949 through 1984, and when I lived in places like Bisbee, Sierra Vista and Tombstone in southern Arizona, the manual was the only way to go. Loads of fun. I even liked the manual better for medium size places like Montgomery AL, Meridian MS, etc. But while living in Los Angeles, the manual did nothing for me. And years of living in the Atlanta area convinced me the manual was never intended for long hours of creepy crawling.
Even thought there were definitely efficiency and performance advantages of the manual over shifting automatics, a non-shifting tranny has those same advantages over a manual. Not just my opinion, but the opinion of those who are testing these things in labratories. Nissan said their lab research during '09 Maxima development showed their CVT would get around one MPG better than the best manual they had available, and they also said that margin would only increase as their CVT development progressed.
When we think about that, the reason is clear. The manual has ONLY five or so ratios, while the CVT has unlimited ratios. Worse, changing ratios (shifting) with the manual will always leave a fraction of a second at each shift where the motor is running, but no power is going to the wheels. But the CVT constantly makes very subtle adjustments 'on the fly', setting up the perfect ratio for each situation, with no gap or pause involved.
Although the manual will gradually fall further behind the CVT in efficiency and performance, I feel the overwhelming reason Nissan did not offer the manual as an option on the '09 Maxima is because they lost millions of dollars producing a manual Maxima that dealers did not want and buyers did not buy from the late 1990s through 2006. The decision was not made by Nissan, but by the buying public.
Were the Maxima still a volume vehicle (around 100K sold), Nissan might have given us a manual and eaten the loss. But the Maxima has moved upscale to near luxury, and there will be less than 50K Maximas sold this year, so the margin just isn't there to cover the losses a manual would bring.
Sadly, I see no way we ever see a manual in the Maxima again.