BMW claims gearshifts take place "in the time a conventional manual transmission would take merely to disengage the clutch." And, because the shifts are electronically controlled and involve no more than the activation of one of the double clutches, faster than any manual shift could ever dream to be. The gearbox itself is otherwise a regular manual transmission.īecause there's no torque converter involved, the direct-drive transmission is more efficient than a conventional auto. The double-clutch arrangement works by always having two sets of gears in mesh - one active and the other ready to go via an electronically activated clutch. The new gearbox is a more refined, smoother-shifting development of the SMG II that applies the double-clutch principle - first seen in VWs and Audis - to soften the transition from ratio to ratio to the extent that it matches a regular planetary auto transmission. SMG has evolved since then, to the seven-speed SMG II when it appeared in the V10-engined M5 in 2006 - and now, to the tongue-twisting "seven-speed sports automatic transmission with double clutch" that will be introduced to Australia in the 335i Coupe and convertibles models from December this year. The Bavarian elves have been tinkering with the concept since the 1990s, when the M3 Coupe offered a six-speed SMG gearbox as an alternative to the regular six-speed manual transmission. BMW is by no means a stranger to automated manual transmissions.
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