What is a Tiptronic gearbox?
Tiptronic Gearbox is a type of discrete automatic transmission developed by Porsche, and used in its vehicles, and those of its licensees.Overview
Tiptronic is a registered trademark, owned by German sports car maker Porsche, who license it for use by other manufacturers, such as Land Rover and the Volkswagen Group (Audi, SEAT, Skoda and Volkswagen). However, many people use the term to refer generically to any automatic torque converter transmission that incorporates a manual up shift/downshift feature.
Human machine interface
A Tiptronic transmission can operate in the same manner as a conventional type of automatic transmission, but the second and sometimes third mode also allows the driver an additional method of manually overriding the automatic shift changes, by moving the shift lever into a second shift gate, equipped with two spring-loaded positions: “up shift” and “downshift”.
Once the lever is in this gate, the driver takes over most of the gear shifting decisions, which would ordinarily be performed by the transmission’s computer, permitting, for example, the delaying of an up shift for increased acceleration, to increase the effect of the engine braking, to prevent shifts in curves, to shift down before passing, or to shift early in economic acceleration.
On some models, the up shift and downshift operations can also be commanded by push-buttons or “paddle shifters” installed on the steering wheel, with an optional display in the instrument panel indicating the current gear selection. And since adding Tiptronic to a (semi-)automatic transmission merely means to plug a new shift lever into the computer and update the software, it is light and cheap.
Though Tiptronic transmissions allow the driver a certain measure of discrete control, the Tiptronic design is implemented using a torque converter like other automatic transmissions. A true Tiptronic transmission is not a computer controlled manual transmission (with a conventional clutch), or semi-automatic transmission.
Most Tiptronic implementations still make some shifts automatically, primarily to protect the engine and transmission. For example, as used by licensee Audi, their five-speed Tiptronic will automatically make the up shifts from 1 to 2 when moving off from a stop, even when in manual mode; the transmission then waits for the user’s up shift command before proceeding from 2 to 3, 3 to 4 and 4 to 5, although the transmission will still up shift if the redline is approached.
On deceleration, the transmission will make all downshifts automatically when close to the tick-over or idle speed, to avoid running the engine at too-low an RPM, although the user can accelerate any downshift (that would not violate the redline), thus allowing improved engine braking, or preparation for intended acceleration.
Most luxury vehicles with a Tiptronic transmission have two fully-automatic modes: the primary mode, identified as “Drive”, “Comfort” or similar; and another, usually called “Sport,” which delays up shifts for a sportier driving at the expense of fuel, wear, comfort, and noise.
Furthermore, because modern Tiptronic-type transmissions now utilize electronics, incorporating an electronic control unit (ECU), sometimes specifically referred to as the transmission control unit, the ECUs are able to use “fuzzy logic”, which means that the operation of the transmission is said to be “adaptive”, whereby it will “learn” how the user drives the car, and will tailor the automatic shift points accordingly.
This adapts to the demands being placed upon the car by the driver. In this way, shift quality has been improved due to better electronic controls.
Some automakers offer paddle shifters behind the steering wheel for controlling their similar transmissions.
Gearbox
Some systems such as Citroën’s Sensodrive, Ferrari’s F1-Superfast, Toyota sequential manual transmission (SMT), and Volkswagen Group’s Direct-Shift Gearbox (DSG) are constructed differently from true Tiptronic transmissions, in that they are actually electro hydraulic manual transmissions, but have an electronically controlled clutch (or in the case of DSG, two clutches).These may be incorrectly referred to as Tiptronic, when considering the original Porsche development, but should be considered to be semi-automatic transmissions. However, even with these “semi automatics”, the word “Tiptronic” may still be licensed by their relative manufacturers to indicate a manual control of such transmissions.
TiptronicS
The Tiptronic S is an upgrade to the original Tiptronic, with the ability to adapt to driver’s behaviour, and also allows driver to change gears without entering manual mode. In manual mode, if there is no manual input for a period of 8 seconds, the system reverts to automatic mode. It was used as early as 2000 Porsche Boxster. In the Porsche Cayenne, the Tiptronic S was upgraded to 6-speed.
In the Porsche 911 (997) Turbo, the Tiptronic S model has faster acceleration over manual counterpart.
General automatic transmissions
Many automatic transmission computers send commands to the engine controller to reduce torque in low gears or at shifting and also to allow the engine to blip the throttle during downshifts for a smoother shift, reducing the “jerry” by the wheels, which affects traction. Other users
