Tag Archives: dual clutch
(Belated) 2010 Geneva Auto Show Recap
(A quick side note from the editor:
I'd like to apologize for the lack of postings these last few weeks. This site is a labor of love, but unfortunately, it doesn't pay the bills as well as I'd like, so I work another job to cover the rent/food/gasoline I so depend on. A couple of weeks ago, I finally got a job in journalism that's exponentially better than my old job was, but since that time, I've been so busy settling in I haven't been able to post here. But three weeks without updates is long enough. I owe you more. )
Wow! Our editor is one sappy son of a bitch, ain't he? God, you can't believe what we have to put up with, the sh…
Still here.
…eer number of nice things he does for us. He's so generous. And kind. Unfortunately, while his generosity is limitless, his credit card isn't, so we weren't able to personally go to this year's Geneva Auto Show. Thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, though, we can cover it like we were there! Isn't that awesome? In fact, forget the last three sentences. We DID go to the Geneva Auto Show, and it was out of this world! We've just been drunk on Toblerone the last couple weeks.
So, behold – our favorite cars from this year's Geneva Auto Show, presented in completely objective fashion by being ranked in order of how cool we think they are.
1. Porsche 918 Spyder concept
Just being a leaner, meaner, less El Camino-like successor to the Carrera GT would have probably been enough to land the 918 on the top of this list. Being a hybrid made it pretty much a shoo-in. But the real reason this bad mother(shut yo' mouth!) ranks as the coolest car of the Geneva Auto Show? Nobody had any idea it was coming. The Carrera GT only wrapped production four years ago. Who would have thought Porsche would bust out its replacement so quickly?
This baby is the future of the supercar, folks. This is what our children will be driving in their heads when they should be studying. Lightness fused with technology. A plug-in hybrid coupled to a powerful engine. Styling that doesn't shamelessly ape the past, but sets a brave new course without forgetting where it comes from.
The 918 Spyder concept comes equipped with a 3.4-liter V8 making more than 500 horsepower, combined with a plug-in battery-electric powertrain making a maximum of 218 horses. The electric motor drives the front wheels, the gasoline engine powers the rear tires through a seven-speed DSG. Porsche claims the car can go up to 16 miles on electric power alone, can achieve 94 mpg, yet also cook off 0-60 runs in 3.2 seconds and top out just under 200 mph. Don't be fooled by the "concept" moniker. Porsche has never made a concept they haven't produced in one way or another, and they're not gonna start now.
2. Ferrari 599 HY-KERS Hybrid
The bad news: rumors of an all-wheel-drive hybrid 599 were incorrect. The good news: going hybrid doesn't look like it'll make Ferraris any less fun. In fact, it'll just make living with one easier.
Which is certainly promising, given what could have been a piece of very ominous news: to conform with new EU regulations, very soon, every Ferrari might be a hybrid.
Whoa, whoa, whoa – no need to buy that Rapture insurance just yet. Judging by the 599 Hybrid, autophiles have nothing to fear. The concept features a 100-horsepower electric motor smooshed in with the seven-speed DSG transmission; at low speeds in town, the car can cruise along in electric mode, or the batteries can summon up a nitrous-like boost for the 612-horsepower 6.0 liter V12. Ferrari claims the 0-124 mph dash is shortened by 0.6 seconds over a stock 599.
Nobody outside of Ferrari has had any seat time in the 599 Hybrid yet, so we don't yet know what it'll be like to drive; however, given the company's entire multibillion dollar reputation is on the line, we're fairly optimistic Ferrari's legendary passion and performance will be pretty much unharmed by the hybrid conversion. In addition, we're hoping the presence of the dual-clutch gearbox here heralds its inclusion in the uber-bitchin' upcoming 599 GTO.
3. 2010 Audi RS5
We previewed the RS5 in our last post, and nothing's really changed, mechanically speaking – still a 450-horsepower 4.2 liter V8 with a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox, still a body that'll make your girlfriend jealous, still causing hundreds of automotive to wake up with erections after dreaming about the eventual comparison with the BMW M3. Nothing we didn't know.
But that doesn't make it any less badass. Or make us want one any less. As much as we love the M3, quattro is handy if you ever venture into the snowy north.
4. 2011 Ruf 911 RGT-8
While perhaps best known as builder of the car Automobile Magazine accidentally incinerated during a post-supercar-comparo dance party with inopportune song selection ("No, dude, the Ruf is actually on fire! We do need water!"), Ruf has a long history of taking Porsches and, like Kanye West did to Daft Punk, making them harder, better, faster and stronger, then slapping their own name on it.
But so far as I'm concerned, this lime-green beaut can drive right in front of Taylor Swift at the next MTV Awards, because Ruf has done what no one thought could – build a 911 with a V8.
Developed and built in-house in just two years, the RGT-8's 4.5 liter engine pumps out 542 horsepower and 369 lb-ft, giving this naturally aspirated 911 more ponies than the new 911 Turbo S also unveiled at the show. Granted, it may not match the S's Kryptonian acceleration (Car and Driver ran the less powerful Turbo with 7-speed PDK from 0 to 60 in 2.9 seconds, which is about as long as it took us to string together the expletive chain we used when we heard that), but it gives us hope that if Porsche runs out of ways to make the 911's six-cylinder more powerful…life will find a way.
5. Lotus Evora 414E Hybrid Concept
This last spot on the list was neck-and-neck between the Evora and the Koenigsegg Agera. The Agera has 910 horsepower, a carbon fiber/aluminum chassis, a top speed of 245 mph and looks cooler than Timothy Olyphant in a gunfight.
But like the 918 Spyder, the Evora represents the future, a world of simultaneous pastry-consumption-and-preservation. Each rear wheel is powered by its own electric motor; together, they produce 408 horsepower – 132 horses more than the V6-powered production Evora, and 120 more than the Lotus Elise-based Tesla Roadster. Unlike the Tesla, though, the Evora Hybrid isn't limited to the amount of energy it can suck out of your wall; should the batteries dip low enough, a 1.2 liter three-cylinder engine kicks in to recharge the battery.
Regular Lotus Evora shown. But you didn't know that, did you?
Lotus says the three-cylinder produces a meager 47 horsepower, which means drivers could be in for an trouser-soiling surprise if the battery goes dead while trying to pass a minivan on a two-lane road. Since the engine isn't driving the wheels, it's not like the car will suddenly lose 85 percent of its horsepower – but if you believe the performance won't suffer significantly, then don't listen to Alfred Molina when he advises you to throw you the idol first.
2010 Koenigsegg Agera:
Did you read the first paragraph about the Lotus?
2010 Brabus E V12 Coupe:
Since Christian Bale's Batman lost his Tumbler to Heath Ledger, I nominate this 788-horsepower, 1047 lb-ft beast to replace it. Let's see the Penguin fuck with this thing.
2010 Pagani Zonda Tricolore:
It pulls 1.45 lateral g, and while the 7.3 liter Mercedes-Benz/AMG-sourced V12 isn't new…it's still an enormous custom AMG V12. Plus, like the Highlander, There Can Be Only One.
Dishonorable Mention:
2011 Aston Martin Cygnet:
Somewhere, Sean Connery's balls have retreated into his body.
2011 Bentley Continental Flying Star by Touring Superleggera:
We were unaware anyone had asked for this.
Honda 3R-C Concept:
If there's one thing people want, it's a one-person electric scooter to replace walking around. How could that go wrong?
Tagged as 2010, 2011, 3r-c, 414E, 599, 911, 918, agera, aston martin, audi, auto show, bentley, brabus, concept, concept car, continental flying star, coupe, cygnet, dual clutch, evora, ferrari, fiorano, geneva, gtb, honda, hy-kers, hybrid, hykers, koenigsegg, lotus, pagani, plug-in, porsche, prototype, rgt-8, rs5, ruf, spyder, tricolore, V8, zonda
Review – 2009 Mitsubishi Lancer Ralliart
The Good: Dual-clutch transmission more appliance than gimmick, good mid-range power, the badass looks of an Evolution for a discount.
The Bad: Economy car interior, a backseat only children could love, and it's not that much of a discount.
The Verdict: The Coke Zero Evo.
The trouble with jacks-of-all-trades is, as the aphorism points out, they don't usually master any of them. This is just as true in the automotive world as anywhere else. For example, minivans promise the space of a van and the driving experience of a car, but end up giving you a top-heavy ride and room for only seven people. Same with sports sedans – they promise the comfort and convenience of a sedan with the performance of a sports car, but often end up compromising on one of those goals in favor of the other.
The Mitsubishi Lancer Ralliart is a compound compromise. Not only is it a sports sedan, it's the reduced-calorie version of Mitsubishi's gonzo Lancer Evolution. The Evo gets a twin-turbo 291-horsepower 2.0-liter inline-four; the Ralliart makes do with a single-turbo version making 237 horses. The Evo also receives some heftier go-fast parts – bigger brakes, tighter suspension, and so forth. In exchange for all this, the Ralliart shaves a few grand off the sticker price.
However, Mitsu deserves a lot of credit for not shaving off two handy performance bits during the cost-cutting: the Evo's all-wheel-drive system and its dual-clutch automated manual transmission, known at Mitsubishi by the Air Force-grade acronym TC-SST. While the former feature is rather common these days (see our featurette on all-wheel-drive), the dual-clutch transmission has mostly remained the provenance of high-priced sports cars; the Ralliart is the cheapest car in America to offer it as standard equipment. (Seriously, who ever thought of Mitsubishi as leading the charge to bring racing technology to the people?)
It doesn't take much time behind the wheel to see why Mitsu felt confident plopping this tranny into every Ralliart. (Sorry, RuPaul, not you.) While the transmission's automatic mode isn't as consistently smooth as a traditional torque-converter automatic transmission, I never had any problems with it, even in New York City stop-and-go traffic. It's good enough you could leave it in auto all the time without complaint…
…but you'd be doing yourself a disservice. No, this transmission shines brightest when you slide the gearshift over into the manual notch and let your fingers do the driving. Steering-column-mounted paddles behind the wheel let you flick through the gears without taking your hands off the leather-wrapped rim; slap the right paddle to upshift, pull the left to downshift. Suddenly, merging onto the freeway feels like coming out of the pit lane at Indy – floor the gas and flick your right fingers three times, and you're ten over the limit by the time you hit your blinker.
And if you forget to uphift, don't worry; the transmission is smart enough to know you'd rather bounce off the limiter and upshifts all by itself rather than introduce your forehead to the steering wheel. Should you prefer the forearm-strengthening motion of a regular manual transmission, you can also shift with the lever. Whether you use the paddles or the gearshift, it's a logical, intuitive system. Porsche could learn a thing or two from Mitsubishi here.
Wait, did I just say Porsche could learn something…from Mitsubishi?
BOOM! (That's the sound of my brain exploding.)
Swiffering.
As a whole, the Ralliart performs impressively. Performance isn't quite at the balls-to-the-wall level of the Evo, but the lesser Lancer grips turns like a 15-year-old grabbing second base for the first time and hurls itself down the road fast enough to put a devilish smile on your face. The sole turbo pumps the engine without significant turbo lag; unlike some cars, you won't be constantly reminded of the engine's forced induction by a sudden burst of whoa! halfway through the rev range. That said, strong midrange power is the engine's best characteristic – you'll never need to worry about whether you've got enough oomph for a (reasonably sane) passing maneuver.
Unfortunately, you can't spend all your life driving switchbacks and idyllic back roads – and if you could, you'd buy a Lotus, not a sedan. And it's when you start considering day-to-day life in the Ralliart that the luster starts to fade.
Stock photo - my tester wasn't equipped with a navigation system.
For example, those optional Recaro front bucket seats that hold you so well in the turns start to get a little uncomfortable after a few hours in the saddle. It's far from a dealbreaker – the seats are still awesome, and given that they come packaged with the 650-watt Rockford Fosgate stereo and xenon headlights, I wouldn't buy this car without them. But my gangly-assed legs were too long to fit comfortably under the steering wheel, so I had to kink my throttle leg out to the side – causing the bolster to render much of my quadriceps numb. Those seats are nice, but they're not worth getting deep-vein thrombosis over.
But bolsters aside, the Recaros are the best thing about the interior. Sadly, that's not so much praise for the front seats as it is unhappiness with the rest of the inside of the car. The back seats seem better suited for the 12-and-under set; for the rest of us, its tight quarters will likely turn games of shotgun into scrums as people claw for the only decent passenger seat.
Interior quality needs some improving as well. The Ralliart's hard plastics and fake-fur headliner would seem cheap in the $15,000 base Lancer; at twice that price, it just seems inexcusable. I'm glad Mitsubishi decided to spend the money on the performance bits, but it's hard to justify a 30 grand car with this kind of interior.
The other major annoyance inside the Ralliart was the red, Atari-grade digital information cluster between the speedometer and the tach. It was perfectly legible, day or night – but the blocky low-fi graphics are so dated and cheesy, I half expected to find Pong in the trip computer functions.
It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that ALL secondary information (beyond speed and rpm) is displayed on this – including the gas gauge. Due to its pixellated nature, I was never sure how much gas I had left; the "miles to empty" feature on the trip computer would tell me I had used up three-quarters of the distance I'd started with, but the gauge seemed to be informing me I still had half a tank. Note to Mitsubishi: the gas gauge is probably not a good place to experiment with new ideas.
Luckily, the outside of the car does a lot to restore the badass image Mitsubishi wants this car to have. Thankfully, they didn't water down the Evo effect for the Ralliart; the two cars look similar enough to be easily confused (indeed, I overheard a few passersby who mistook it for the tougher model). The enormous grill is done right – it looks menacing and hungry, as opposed to some Audi models that sport the slack-jawed look of Luke Skywalker after Darth Vader dropped a certain paternity bombshell.
But the Ralliart's similarity to the Evo just draws out the identity crisis this little Mitsubishi faces. It's trying to be a cut-rate performance car, and to a large extent, it succeeds – it has all the performance anybody would ever need. Problem is, the people who buy cars like this want all the performance they can get; if they didn't, they'd spend the money on a nice Camry instead. The people who would buy this car are probably gonna be people who aspire to an Evolution – but an Evo starts at $33,685, and my Ralliart cost $30,065. (All prices here and below include destination charges.) It's hard to imagine people not trying to stretch into the Evo.
But intra-brand competition aside, it's still hard to know where the Ralliart is trying to belong. At that price, it's facing some pretty stiff competition on both the "sport" and the "sedan" ends of the spectrum. If someone were looking for a kickass performance car, a Ford Mustang GT with Track Pack runs $30,340, while a base Nissan 370Z goes for for $30,650. Sure, each gives up some back seat room, but they'll both rip off 0-60 times at least half a second quicker than the Ralliart, and look much better doing it.
On the other hand, if someone's looking for a sedan that happens to be fun to drive, an Acura TSX retails for $30,120. It's not as fast as the Ralliart, but it's tossable, fun-to-drive and comes with an interior that looks like it belongs in a car costing $50,000.
But of course, the Ralliart's real foe lies in the Subaru dealerships. The Ralliart exists almost entirely due to the Subaru WRX; to put it in SAT terms, Ralliart:Evolution::WRX:STI. The STI and the Evo have been butting bumpers for half a decade, but until now, Mitsubishi hasn't stacked up a challenger to the lesser WRX.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this first shot at the Rex will be the one to claim the prize. The WRX packs 265 horsepower, roughly 10 percent more than the Ralliart; Car and Driver ran one from 0 to 60 in a slightly ridiculous 4.7 seconds. In addition, assuming the WRX's interior is like the Impreza I just drove (stay tuned for that review next week), it's a far nicer place to spend time than the Ralliart. And the Subaru is cheaper to boot: the Premium model equivalant to my Ralliart goes out the door for $28,190, but a stripper model with all the go-fast bits can be bought for $25,690 – $1,475 less than the Ralliart. (Subaru also offers a choice between sedan and hatchback/miniwagon body styles).
So in the end, the Ralliart, in spite of its twin clutches and ripped shitless exterior, is all about compromise – between utility and performance, between econocar Lancer and bat-outta-hell Evolution. But in trying to compromise, it ends up looking like a perennial runner-up no matter what angle you're looking at it from. To make this car a winner, Mitsubishi either needs to compromise a little less on the quality – or compromise a little more on price.
Base Price/Price as Tested (inc. destination): $27,165/$30,065
EPA Fuel Economy: 17/25 miles per gallon
Tagged as 370z, acura, all wheel drive, dual clutch, evolution, ford, impreza, lancer, mitsubishi, mustang, nissan, porsche, ralliart, recaro, rockford fosgate, sti, subaru, tc-sst, tsx, wrx