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Let's Talk About Those Weird Clutchless Manual Gearboxes From Ferrari and Porsche |
- Clutchless manual
Long before companies like Volkswagen and Porsche got the technology right with DSG and PDK, respectively, many automakers spent years trying and failing to make a manual gearbox work with no clutch pedal. We need to go weirder than that. Today, automated manual gearboxes are almost always operated with paddle shifters off the steering wheel, or maybe a gear lever with an up-and-down motion. Things used to be a lot stranger than that—think an H-pattern shifter like a conventional manual, but with no clutch pedal.
Chrysler offered this sort of thing back in the s , and the Volkswagen Beetle had a version of it too. But one of the earliest performance-centric clutchless manual gearbox systems I can find is the Porsche Sportomatic that was available in , three years after the debut of the A small switch was added to the shift lever so the car could detect when a shift was demanded and sent a signal to the pneumatic ram that disengaged the clutch.
Porsche advises owners to use D as the normal driving gear, but you can shift from L through the gears if desired. It seems that it can function as a normal automatic most of the time. The Valeo part of that nameplate comes from French parts supplier Valeo and their contribution to making a clutchless system for the manual gearbox Mondial T. They may have taken inspiration from the Porsche Sportomatic concept but decided to ditch the torque converter and unique hardware in favor of some computing power from Valeo along with an electronic clutch actuator fitted to the standard gated manual gearbox.
From this archived Road and Track review of the Valeo, it seems that Ferrari decided that this gearbox makes the Mondial T more accessible to women. This is the general concept that has held up to this day. Using electronics to precisely locate the clutch and shifter helps the car make a smoother shift, and the Mondial Valeo apparently monitors and protects from inputs that would damage the engine or gearbox through vehicle speed, RPM, and gear selection.
I found a YouTube video of someone driving it, which was illuminating. It seems that you drive it like a manual with no clutch. While these gearboxes may seem pointless, they do genuinely let more people enjoy the cars.
Some people flat out do not want to drive stick, and this removes one of the great stresses of manual gearbox operation.
Like the transmissions on our list, it uses a normal H-pattern shifter but has no physical clutch pedal. Where these old cars had to work around their primitive ECUs, the Hyundai can dance with all of the subsystems of the car. Chris Rosales is a writer and video host at Car Bibles. He covers a myriad of topics, mostly focused on the technical side of automobiles as well as performance driving and automotive history. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he frequents the Southern California canyons and car culture.
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