When buying the first car, many of us are faced with a dilemma about which gearbox, tiptronic or automatic machine to choose. Many novice drivers do not know that in fact the terms mentioned mean completely different things, so comparing them will not be entirely correct. In this article we will try to understand what tiptronic is and what is the principle of its functioning.
First of all, I would like to destroy the long-standing stereotype and emphasize that this name does not mean at all one of the varieties of transmission. It is a feature that allows you to manually shift gears on an automatic transmission. Moreover, now the name of this ability of the machine is a separate trademark, which is called Tiptronic. Note that the first time it was registered back in 1989, belongs to the German automobile concern Porsche. According to company representatives, this system was developed for sports cars in order to provide more efficient
gear shifting. This was achieved by reducing the trajectory of the lever.
Among other things, the tiptronic box is also characterized by the fact that this function allows the car driver to control the dynamics of movement in different variations in the functioning of the motor. In other words, he has opportunities that are unrealistic for standard automatic transmissions in a classic form, in particular, the ability to accelerate further, turn on a lower gear in turns , brake using an engine, and so on.
Speaking about what tiptronic is, you also need to understand the principle of its action. To switch to this mode, it is necessary to translate the selector lever of the machine box into a special cutout located in the wings. It can also be determined by the presence of the symbols “plus” and “minus”. There are several design variations, based on which, the number of switches can be from one to three (to activate the mode, lower and increase gear).
From them, the signals enter the electrical unit, which, in turn, runs the entire algorithm and shifts gears. In modern car models, the transition to manual control can also be carried out through the “petals” - special switches located under the steering wheel, after which information on the selected gear is displayed on the information display.
The first car to appear on the market with an
automatic transmission equipped with tiptronic function was the
Porsche 911. It rolled off the assembly line in 1990, and after some time other leaders in the global automotive industry also adopted this know-how. Note that they used a different name then, because the official owner of the Tiptronic brand was Porsche. In fact, all this led to the fact that such a name became a household name. As a result of this, confusion arises in the question of what tiptronic is. This problem still persists.
As a result, when talking about what tiptronic is, they often mean any automatic transmission that has a manual control function, regardless of which algorithm of action is embedded in it.