I am confused on the CVT transmission that Mitsubishi has on its Lancers, is a CVT transmission basically a automatic transmission?
Nice try but that's a million year deal whereas global warming has happened in less than a hundred years.
Magnetic poles flip every 1000 years or so. Today, the magnetic north is drifting about 1/10 of a degree every year. I can't wait for some Liberal to make this another global crisis and planetary emergency.
It is basically an automatic transmission with a greater range of gear ratios. Most autos these days have four, and more commonly in newer cars, five, six or seven ratios. Ususally they are programmed with five or six optimal ratios on a conical drive The theory is that CVT transmissions are lighter and always operate in the best gear ratio.
A CVT is an automatic transmission. It looks like a snowmobile centrifugal transmission. The difference is that they put the working bits in a case and it uses a steel belt in oil instead of a dry rubber belt. As someone else said some manufacturers give you the option of selecting preset gear ratios yourself if you desire it. But that option is moot because a CVT will also compensate for engine load as well as speed.
A regular automatic transmission gearbox has several gears of different sizes. To vary the ratio between the engine RPM and rotation rate of the wheels, the automatic transmission has to shift between gears of different diameters. In a CVT transmission, the gears are replaced by two pulleys that can change their diameters on the fly to vary the ratio between engine RPM and wheel rotation rate. That is why there is no gear-shifting in a CVT transmission. It's two variable-diameter pulley wheels connected by a friction belt. Because the CVT pulleys can change to any diameter best suited to the power demand at the moment (essentially an infinite number of ratios), it is more efficient than a gearbox with a selection of fixed-diameter gears. Because there is no gear-shifting at all (and the pulley diameters are controlled by computer), you can say the CVT is a type of automatic transmission. Some car companies do offer CVTs programmed to vary their pulley diameters in distinct steps to simulate gear-shifting lurches though (the shift shock). Hope this explains things a bit.
