Paddle Shifter Thoughts

Zerostatic

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For those of you with the paddle shifters on your Sport and Sport Touring CVT hatchbacks. What are your impressions of them. Does it help at all in driving or even enjoyment of driving. Do you use them regularly?
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Gruber

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I haven't been using them much in the manual mode in S, but started recently using them routinely in D for engine braking. No computer will know when you want to just coast or need to slow down before lights or turns. So you need to reduce the gear yourself. The CVT reduces the ratio automatically when I apply the brakes, but it goes immediately back to the highest possible gear after I release the brakes.
Saving the brakes and being already in the right gear ratio to resume when turning, are some of the benefits.
 

erbee

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Using paddles completely defects the purpose of a CVT.
 

Gruber

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Using paddles completely defects the purpose of a CVT.
You forgot to add "...the way I see it". "The purpose of a CVT" as defined by whom? I don't know what is the purpose of a CVT to you, if any. The purpose for which I use a car, and specifically a CVT-equipped one is probably completely different from what you think. One of the main purposes of my CVT is "to not have a clutch pedal in this particular car". It fits perfectly this purpose.:thumbsup:

But if you want it explained in detail what is the purpose of CVT + paddles combination for many people, read this:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-point-of-paddle-shifters-with-a-CVT

Also, in the same link:

"Automatics frankly kinda dumb. The closest I’ve come to a good one is the one in the Audi A3. But (and I know it’s not their fault) they can’t predict what the performance of the car should be in the next few seconds. The driver can. For instance you will need to climb a hill. An auto will wait until the engine is lugging before a downshift. A human can see it coming and downshift ahead of time."

I hope it makes the purpose of paddles with a CVT a bit clearer to you.
 
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Zatannaz

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I kinda am wishing i could add the 2019 touring paddle shifters to my 2018 touring.
 


_dc_

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For those of you with the paddle shifters on your Sport and Sport Touring CVT hatchbacks. What are your impressions of them. Does it help at all in driving or even enjoyment of driving. Do you use them regularly?
Canadian 1.5T coupes got paddle shifters too! Good for engine braking and the occasional bit of fun pretending to shift, but otherwise pointless. I do wish paddle shifter equipped CVTs had a "L" mode though.
 

Scott_ATL

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The paddle shifters were not a "selling point" for me when I bought my Sport Touring a month ago. Having all of the luxury features I had in my previous car, *plus* great gas mileage and cargo capacity was the primary selling point. I honestly never expected to use the paddle shifters. However, on a recent day trip through the north GA mountains, I found putting the CVT into S mode and using the paddle shifters gave me better control of the car ascending and descending the mountain grades by changing to the preset ratios. Once out of the mountains, I was back in D mode and with no complaints. Will I use the paddle shifters on a daily basis in my city commutes? Doubtful; but it's nice to know they are there to give me a bit more control when I choose to do so. Otherwise, I'm content to the let the CVT do its thing and keep giving me 36+ mpg combined. :)
 

Goseki

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Paddles are fun. I had the shift mode on my kia, was fun to use when I'm very bored, but honestly I used it less than 5% of the time. I wish I had the paddle shifters, but I wouldn't look at it as a make or break. The homelink mirror, vol knob, and sound dampening are much more useful additions to the 2019. The only downside are those rims...
 

civicdabest-foo

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I occasionally throw my BMW X5 city driver's Steptronic into manual mode. It doesn't have paddles, you bump the shifter up/down. I find it to be utterly F'ing pointless other than to have a little bit of fun 5% of the time.

TBH, the CVT on the 1.5L under most city driving circumstances, shifts to a higher ratio with pedal input, about as fast as the Steptronic on the X5, which is saying something about this CVT.

I would love to have paddles on the 1.5L Touring. But I know it would be totally useless on a car whose transmission responds quite well to pedal input.

Would love to have had paddles on my old 8th gen Civic I had, that thing was terrible at figuring out what gear I wanted.
 

civicdabest-foo

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Anyone know how well thought out the paddle shifters on the CVT behave?

I know on some econoboxes, the up/down on the shift lever are not really well-integrated. You could put it to 2nd and still be in 3rd. . They lack proper feedback.

Anyone know if the paddle shifters on the CVT are clunky feel-good ornaments or do they do a good job like Steptronic on BMW?
 


Charley-TX

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As with everything else we see on this forum, it is personal preference. With my civic the option to monkey around with the selections of ECO, D, S is plenty. Only used L a handful of time at most.
In the past 4 years I had 3 cars with paddles and 1 truck (that I used to pull a 5th wheel RV) that had the Auto+ manual gear select option, "manual option" was very useful to have.
With the cars I found it fun to play with it sometimes, but I could never do better than the auto mode could, so it became an annoyance.
The most fun was bmw 135 straight 6, twin turbo. But if I wanted to "Not let some one pass me from the red light" I just simply used ample or full throttle and let the trans do what it was made to do rather than me mess up the shift. With the VW TDI diesel + DSG trans, the paddles were utterly useless due to the diesels short RPM and peak torque range.
As I said With this Civic having the ECO, D, and S option is plenty because the CVT does an excellent job, especially being matched to low RPM torque of the DI 15T.
 

MDB

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I find paddles very useful in D mode. Mostly these situations:
1. Before making a turn for engine braking and following acceleration. It's exactly what one would do in MT. Sometimes I use it just for slowing down with or without brake pedal, and unlike MT there's no associated clutch wear.
2. If I know I'll need to accelerate hard very soon (e.g traffic merge, lane change in certain cases) I prepare a lower gear so that when I kick the gas pedal correct ratio is already set. Results in 25-30% faster acceleration according to my measurements. Alternatively, I switch to S mode and don't use paddles, but it takes a bit more time to change the mode, so it really depends on situation.
3. If I need to accelerate *now* I find downshifting simultaneously with kicking the gas results in a better acceleration in certain cases (depends on the RPM and ratio before acceleration).
4. While Civic accelerates nicely in D in most cases, in some instances when I am already accelerating and I need to accelerate faster and floor the gas for that reason, the car does not really do anything (happens time to time, but not easy to reproduce, I have no idea what causes this). Downshifting with paddles fixes the issue immediately.

Great thing about CVT paddles is that unlike MT or classic automatic (with paddles) there's no interrupt in power flow to the transmission. This means mistakes are much less expensive. Downshifting too much or too little can be fixed immediately with virtually no penalty. E.g. if you kick down to 3rd and realize 2nd would work better (or the other way round) if you are in MT or automatic you have to think twice whether changing the gear again worth it (power loss followed by a more efficient acceleration), in CVT you just fix the gear on the fly (no power loss, also 1 step gear change is very fast).

There's another advantage over automatic. In automatic with paddles if you change the gear exactly at the moment the automatic decides to do the same it results in a wrong gear (too low or too high), extremely-extremely-extremely annoying. Never happens with CVT because of the continuous nature of CVT.
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