Paddle Shifters

The Angry Welshman

The Angry Welshman

The Angry Welshman

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Maybe a stupid question, but here goes

When i pick up the mercedes tmrw, its fully automatic but with paddle shifters....when and why would they be used??

not had a car with them before, so this is new too me in my 30ish years of driving
 
The Angry Welshman said:
Maybe a stupid question, but here goes

When i pick up the mercedes tmrw, its fully automatic but with paddle shifters....when and why would they be used??

not had a car with them before, so this is new too me in my 30ish years of driving
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Main use is to manually shift down before an overtake, you won't use them much in all likelihood but they just give you a bit of control.
 
The only genuinely useful use for paddle shifters in 'normal' cars is if its an EV and it lets you control the regen.

Always seemed pointless unless its something like an E46 M3 CLS
 
I have them on my BMW. Total use in nearly 5 years? Maybe 20-30. It's alright for a few minutes but having an 8 speed 'box you're pulling loads of times going up and down. I just leave it alone now.
 
MissChief said:
I tend to press the sport button which drops a gear or two for me.
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I've literally never dropped a gear or two for an overtake - occasionally stuck it in sport or used kick down if it is really required.

Modern automatic gearboxes respond so quickly and usually so well that manually working the gears is rarely if ever required (usually in sport it'll be fairly close to ideal power band for instant response). The only exception sometimes is hills but even then they cope just might not be ideal.
 
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Rroff said:
I've literally never dropped a gear or two for an overtake - occasionally stuck it in sport or used kick down if it is really required.

Modern automatic gearboxes respond so quickly and usually so well manually working the gears is rarely if ever required (usually in sport it'll be fairly close to ideal power band for instant response). The only exception sometimes is hills but even then they cope just might not be ideal.
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I've found the ZF8HP to be good generally, but if you're bumbling along at 45 in a NSL and see a gap it can take 2-3 seconds for the box to realise you want to go and it drops one or two gears then sometimes overracts, drops another gear and you're flying past at 5k rpm sounding like a nutter. If I engage sport it drops two gears, puts me about 2500-3000 rpm where the meat of the torque is and it won't kick down.
 
MissChief said:
I tend to press the sport button which drops a gear or two for me.
Click to expand...
That works too. I tend to hold the left paddle for 2 seconds as this puts the car in 'Sprint' mode which automatically drops you a couple of gears, not sure if that's a common thing or a BMW-specific feature though.
 
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MissChief said:
I've found the ZF8HP to be good generally, but if you're bumbling along at 45 in a NSL and see a gap it can take 2-3 seconds for the box to realise you want to go and it drops one or two gears then sometimes overracts, drops another gear and you're flying past at 5k rpm sounding like a nutter. If I engage sport it drops two gears, puts me about 2500-3000 rpm where the meat of the torque is and it won't kick down.
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Yup can attest to that too. I drive down a lot of NSL single and wide single lanes where there's room to overtake people doing 35 for no reason. I use comfort mode quite a bit and that really does take time to kick down.

Going down hills, especially following electric cars which one moment do 30 and the next 65 it's quite nice to be able to hang on to a gear and not break all the time.
 
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My old man had a 335xd with them never used them, the autobox on his would drop a few gears almost instantly if you gave the accelerator peddle a sharp tap as opposed to just planting the accelerator and waiting for it to down shift.
 
from a manual control freek perspective
I'm surprised you can't get gear you want without using a sport button - aren't the paddles with eyes remaining on the road the safer way to get precise gear 3rd/4th for overaking,
or equally on NSL coming to medium bend changing to 4th/5th/6th, before any braking, to be in right gear.

Once you are doing the overtake usually want to hold the gear too, until you can see it is really safe and can change up (wouldn't want to lift off slightly and then decide you want lower gear back)

(I need to re-watch the kubica auto drive around the nurbugring)
 
Used them a little bit in my old car maybe 5 or 6 times in 5 years, to downshift when going down steepish hills, until I got the knack of using the brake pedal to nudge the car to choose a lower gear itself
Same engine in a different car and with a 6 speed box, and not a 7 speed as before, and I have the opposite problem. No nudging required when going down steepish hills, but often have to force it out of too low a gear when the hill flattens out. Of course I could just let it do its own thing but normal gear change rev range seems to be different after a long hill and I don’t like to hear the engine screaming
 
My Lancer will operate in full Auto and the gear lever can be knocked to the side to give you a "Tiptronic" type of shifter. It also has paddles.

Sport mode and the paddles are used, generally on empty single carriageway A Roads, but I generally leave it in Auto for day to day driving.

Much more relaxed, and suitable for my normal commute on busy roads.
 
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