2017 Outback (Yes I’m kicking myself for not spending 5K more on a Toyota back then). It has the paddle shifters, I kind of forgot they were even there. Can they be used to improve gas mileage or brake life, or am I just more likely to mess up my transmission using them?
Some sports cars started offering them about 12 yrs ago and everyone jumped on the bandwagon and found them in just about everything. They're just a gimmick that has played itself out and more of an annoyance that they're there. Only useful if you track your car.
Can they be used to improve gas mileage or brake life,
fuel economy, no.
Brake life, sure, at the cost of transmission life.
You can use them to prevent brake fade on very long, steep, mountainous hills.
Or sometimes I like to hold a gear when the auto is frequently "hunting".
Otherwise, they're useless gimmicks.
Definitely not for the gas mileage, but if you want to downshift in some scenarios to get a better acceleration, they can be useful.
It's unlikely they'll do much for gas mileage or performance. You wouldn't want to use the CVT in place of brakes. (Brake pads are cheap to replace. Not so the CVT.)
Maybe some people like the sports car feel that manually running up and down the pseudo-gears gives them.
what? CVT's have paddle shifters?
Subaru at least does. Their CVT simulates a conventional transmission with shift points and it can be controlled with the paddle shifters.
Thanks…I would rather be driving a Rambler!
Although Rambler obviously never had a CVT or paddle shifters they did have this neat setup available for manual trans:
paddle shifters defeat the whole purpose of a CVT! What a preposterous idea.
It's nuts but friends of mine have 'em and I've driven them and that's the way they work. I guess the CVT can still pick the ratios for the different "gears" on the fly, but yeah it seems pretty useless except like you said maybe for descending a really steep grade. For that though it would probably make more sense just to have a "hill retarder" position for the CVT like the old Chevy Turboglide.
About the same value as start/stop technology. I wonder how much this useless feature (among others) added to the price of the car.
Live and learn….wish I would have found this community sooner.
It could have been worse, at least you didn't buy from GM or Chrysler. I know several people with late model Subarus and they seem OK. Probably won't last as long as a Toyota but they haven't had any serious problems.
Even five years ago I had lived and learned well enough to run from a GM or Chrysler 🤣