I reckon it's a '
horses for courses' thing... :dontknow:
I've been lucky enough to drive a few pretty sporty (some of them very expensive!) cars with DCT's; and I've even owned & driven a (
slightly modified
) Hyundai Kona 1.6TT (lotsa HP, but still reasonably lightweight!
) for over 100,000 kms without any issues, and they
can be really great to drive and reliable too!
hyea:
But as Ron mentioned, it seems that the heavier the cars are teamed with higher HP, and the DCT's can very quickly become problematic - at least in cars & seemingly in motorcycles/trikes too.
HOWEVER, at least here in Oz, there are a growing number of heavy haulage vehicles out there that are using DCT's or variants thereof that are managing very well, many of them having now racked up more than 6 figures of miles without concern or even any excessive/abnormal maintenance - and they're pretty heavy, haul heavy loads, and have lots of HP too!! Given that I
might only be talking to those who like them, but going by what I hear & see from daily users, owners, and maintainers, I might even hazard a guess that the heavy DCT units are more widely respected amongst the heavy haulage fraternity than traditional auto's for their Big Rigs... :dontknow:
And then there's all the racing machines that are going that way too - if they aren't hybrid electric things, it seems a fair number of some racing machines are opting to use DCT's or variants thereof - there's apparently not too many traditional manual gearboxes or auto's in the big money end of some racing marques anymore! So maybe we will see DCT technology improve and gradually filter down into more mainstream/daily use vehicles...
