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BorgWarner breathes next-generation life into the manual transmission
DETROIT - So here's Robert D. Welding, president and general manager of BorgWarner Inc.'s Transmission Systems - an outfit that's earned part of its ironclad reputation by making critical components for automatic transmissions - effusing about an all-new technology to greatly expand the reach of manual transmissions.
Don't steel yourself for another tale of a perfectly reputable supplier's ill-considered "expansion" into a business it knows nothing about. BorgWarner knows transmissions - and never mind that it probably knows automatics a little better than it knows manuals. Because Mr. Welding's talking about turning manuals into automatics.
You've heard about so-called "automated" manual transmissions, and there are a couple, from the likes of Volkswagen AG and Fiat SpA's Ferrari and Alfa Romeo, already in production. But BorgWamer thinks it can do better. And so does at least one major European OE: it will use the new BorgWarner technology for a production vehicle next year.
An engineer at heart, Mr. Welding likes to call the new technology a "layshaft automatic," but knows that's not likely to connect outside the pocket-protector crowd. So while the company works on a catchy trade name, we'll use the BorgWarner term "dual clutch transmission," or DCT.
That dual-clutch moniker is important, because that's what BorgWarner believes makes its system better. As with competing automated manuals, the driver pawns off the job of shifting to a home of electronic sensors and hydraulic actuators and a brainy black box. There's no clutch pedal to finesse, no gear lever to move - drop it in "drive" and the electrohydraulic minions do the rest.
But BorgWarner's dual-clutch design is crucial, as it largely tempers a vexing bugaboo that plagues most contemporary automated manuals: "shift shock," or what the engineers like to call "torque interrupt." The effect occurs when...