nowt to do with our cars, but take a look..

http://www.autozine.org/technical_school/tech_index.htm

Interesting site. Shows how things work.

Probably another site of How things work is already know.
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/
This site shows how things work in cars, home stuff, computers, electrical etc.


Especially the page about the VCT transmission is interesting. I specially like the drive test animation about two equel cars with the same engine. One with manuel transmission and one with CVT. The start at the same time and you can see what happens withe the speed and revs while the accelerating. The drive test animation is more at the bottem of the page:
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/cvt.htm/printable
CVT ROCKS (':340:')


Hans

Interesting stuff there Hans - I`ve always felt the cvt to be quite nippy for an auto, given that the 1.4 is quite underpowered in any case. Nice to see it becoming more mainsteam and to have the advantages so clearly explained.

If some bright spark can find some of those non slip steel belts to fit the Volvo box, there could be some interesting conversions afoot....

Will

the revcounter is wrong in the cvt demo..

the reason they are slower irl is cos its very lossy - i believe about 40% of power is lost, compared with about 25 in a manual..

On the volvo cvt the revs would climb faster into the power band - revs would also increase a bit on a hill assuming road speed remained constant. The revs would also drop down once acceleration had stopped.

They do lose more power compared to a manual but less than a contempary planetary autobox would - as well as being much more mechanically staightforward.

Bear in mind too that transmission losses are offset to some extent by improved efficiency given by running the engine at optimum speed all of the time.

Well most of the time anyway - high speed cruising on the volvo cvt tends to run the engine a bit fast, giving poorer fuel consumption.

Will