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Vocis
Mike Everitt, Managing Director, Vocis
Driveline Controls
Will the car of 2018 have a DCT and how will it vary from today’s?
It's going to vary between individual categories of car, I’m absolutely
sure. In recent years – Frankfurt especially – there’s
been emphasis on hybrids and different theories on whether they are a
stop-gap measure or be an end in themselves.
There are a variety of things that can be done with transmission control
incorporating hybrids, from the CVT-type unit on the Prius, to assisting
stepped autos or putting e-machines on a DCT.
Certainly you could put them on a DCT and completely delete the synchros
for example and use the electric motors as well as to drive the car you
could use them to achieve the shaft synchronisation and therefore you
could actually pull out some of the cost from inside the gearbox to go
some way towards offsetting the higher cost of it being a hybrid system.
There are a lot of areas for further exploitation on hybridising a DCT
if a DCT is the most appropriate for the particular engine technology
that’s coming along.
One of the things I’m quite interested to look at the practical
characteristics of are these new HCCI engines. You can imagine that the
switching strategies that those types of engines are going to use could
be quite an interesting thing to try and integrate with the gearshift
selections in any kind of transmission because as they go from spark ignition
to compression ignition and back again across different phases of the
warm up cycle something like that technology could be won or lost on whether
or not the driver feels it’s hunting or hesitating or shuttling
if it just switches state at exactly the time it changes gear and it makes
it feel like a bump; is the driver going to get irritated by it or just
accept it?
All of those sorts of things are interesting areas and I think still,
by the timescale you’re talking about, we’re going to be on,
essentially, technology that’s not going to be so far away from
what we’ve got visibility of right now.
Moving on from the touchscreen selection options in demo Audi A3, and
discussions with OEMs for next levels on from that – 2018 car could
feature what?
Even to hint at them more or less gives them away but the absolutely obvious
one is the deletion of a gearlever itself. That in itself isn’t
new, and that’s why I mentioned it as the first one. The other thing
could be that certain aspects of driving a car, if you don’t pay
attention to, you can lose sight of what makes people enjoy cars in the
first place.
You can make them easier and easier to drive but in the process of doing
that, does that actually make them less fun to drive? At the end of the
day, most people have their cars to go from A to B but a lot of people
have cars because they enjoy them, and would sooner have this one than
that one.
On that basis, making it involving and fun to drive is quite important
and giving the driver some tactility and some feeling of real connection
with the car – when he does something he actually feels a reaction
from it – is something that’s quite important we think to
making the difference between ‘it was ok but I wouldn’t buy
one’ to ‘that’s fantastic: I really need to get one
of those because it has distinguishing features or characteristics.’
It’s a very personal thing, how you buy one car over another, and
they’re not an insignificant investment for most people; you want
something that makes you feel a bit special when you drive it.
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Volkswagen
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January 2008
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