What was wrong with PRND?

ninty9er

Just a general random question. Why have car manufacturers become insistent on shunning the traditional PRND2L auto box in favour of things like Easymatic, M-MT, the quasi-auto in the fiesta and such like.

What in the name of Christ was wrong with the old setup?

Would the money put into developing this crap not be better spend elsewhere or improving the twinning of tiptronic to the traditional auto as mastered/developed by Mitsubishi in the early nineties?

What is so distressing about selling a car that you put in P to anchor when parked, R to reverse N to idle and D to drive??

colm_mcm

thise older PRND321 boxes were gererally torque convertors where no manual changedown was intended, granted they had a lock-out feature for keeping the car below a certain gear.

The INVECS-II system Mitsubishi had, with tiptronic override and adaptive shift control (which adapted changes to driving style) was a very impressive piece of kit, and was one of the first decent auto box for the masses.

However, the advantage a MMT/MultiMode or Durashift-EST, or Sensodrive gearbox is that there is no increase in emissions or fuel consumption, in some cases both figures are reduced.

Example: Toyota Yaris 1.3 Luna 5dr.

Manual Fuel consumption:ECE 99/100 urban (l/100km): 7.2, country/highway (l/100km): 5.3, combined (l/100km): 6.0

Multimode Fuel consumption: ECE 99/100 urban (l/100km): 6.7, country/highway (l/100km): 5.3, combined (l/100km): 5.8


These are essentially manual gearboxes with clutches where both gearbox and clutch are controlled by actuators. this means that production costs are greatly reduced, parts used are the same for manual and auto, fuel consumption drops, emissions drop, and subsequently the option of an automatic isn't as expensive as would normally be the case.

Lucifer

As far as I know the reason is cost, auto boxes are more expensive. Alot of easy tronic/mta boxes are just standard manual gear boxes that use motors to select gear and operate the clutch. An full automatic is completely different and more expensive to produce.

ninty9er

Always wondered about that, thanks lads.

The PRND box with a tip still appeals more to me though. I suppose it depends on how much/ if you care as long as the car moves.