

The whole thing works a bit like one of those Russian helicopters with coaxial blades. So you have gears 1, 3, 5 and 7 on one clutch and 2, 4 and 6 on the other. To put it simply, all twin-clutch gearboxes work by separating the odd and even gears on individual shafts. They developed it for their famous racing prototypes and eventually brought it into production as the gearbox we know today as the PDK. The first people to ask themselves "but what if we took a manual gearbox and gave it two clutches" were Porsche. The auto was smooth but slow to react and thirsty, the CVT was efficient but weird to use and the single-clutch automated manual was jerky and unresponsive. All had their advantages and disadvantages. For years, the market was split between conventional automatics with torque converters, CVTs and single-clutch autos. To answer that question, we need to look at the needs of people who don't want to work the clutch. So, why is everybody going crazy and deciding two clutches are now necessary? Details are limited, but the unit is engineered to take up to 550 Nm of torque, which is what you get from a V6 engine or a very highly tuned 2-liter diesel these days. It has recently revealed a brand new 10-speed unit it says will go into production cars soon. Volkswagen, the company that first decided one clutch was not enough, is also moving the game forwards. Even Lamborghini was forced to adopt this tech, a 7-speed twin being added to the Huracan supercar – LDF, which is short for Lamborghini Doppia Frizione. Both Ford and Renault offer a 6-speed unit under the names PowerShift and EDC (Efficient Double Clutch), while Fiat and Alfa Romeo call it a TCT (Twin Clutch Transmission). For example, Korean car company Hyundai plans to introduce a 7-speed unit on models like the i30 and Veloster. Many car companies have started to use double clutch gearboxes on mainstream cars these days, following the lead set by the Audi TT and the Mk4 Golf R way back in the early 2000s. The Germans call it Doppelkupplungsgetriebe, but everybody else who doesn't join three words into one calls it the Direct Shift Gearbox, or DSG for short. Why does the DSG from Volkswagen suffer from reliability issues?īefore getting into the reliability issues of DSG gearbox let's know what actually the DSG gearbox is?
