Author:
madcows
<
1
>
73.3.171.35
Use
this link
if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion.
Date:
1/9/2021 8:01:54 PM
Subject:
RE: I did a thing
A free Toyota that drives is a fair price. I didn't know they were putting CVTs in the Camrys back in the early 2000s. I know some Audis did.
I've grown up with German cars and to a lesser extent, Japanese. When I think of assembly differences, I can sum it up like this: Some German cars would use unnecessarily long bolts, while Jap cars would use perfectly sized ones; no excess threads. Production efficiency and all that.
It's kind of weird, but it seems like in the past, all cars had their eras. For instance, the 80s were dominated by great German cars, trailed by the Japanese. Then in the 90s it was reversed. Every major Japanese brand had a handful of great cars back then. American cars were largely shit starting some time in the 70s, and other than a few exceptions, lasted until the past decade.
Hondas overall tend to be more "sporty" than Toyotas, but most people prefer the comfort of the latter. That said, I found many Toyotas to be fairly uncomfortable, at least in terms of seating.
In the case of my Insight, it has what Honda calls eCVT which is more of a misnomer than even Toyota's ECVT found in their hybrids. The Honda is actually a series hybrid with the electric traction motor attached to the wheels via a fixed gearset. However, at certain highway speeds, there's a clutch pack that can engage so that the gas engine can drive the wheels directly through an overdrive gear set. There's no way to vary the gearing ratio. It's mechanically very simple and therefore hopefully very reliable. From what I read, they opted for this layout because it lends itself to plug-in hybrid designs without any modification other than larger battery packs. Toyota had to modify their Prius transaxle to support plug-in tech. Either way, these systems have practically no wear items in their transmissions. Like I said, these are all very mechanically simple, even compared to a manual transmission.
Now a days, automatics and automated manuals (dual clutch, etc) have at least 6 gear ratios. I remember driving such a 4cyl Camry years back, and it was constantly changing gears. Now a bunch of cars have 8 or even 10 gear ratios. That's a whole lot of transmission activity going on, which makes me weary about long-term reliability. To be fair, modern control methodology ensures that engine rev matching occurs during shifting to practically eliminate clutch pack wear, but still, there's a ton of shit going on in there. I'm not a huge fan of mechanical CVTs because they rely on friction to do their thing, so there's always a little bit of wear going on, but given the complexity of modern transmissions, they might as well just go with a CVT and make them easily serviceable.
