CTS Alloys wheel heat

[btx5mg]

Just looking at that shifter made me think-what would it be like for me to shift left handed? Any one ever tried driving a car like that? More likely I would suspect you have driven american cars, how did that go?

Mike

This is my first Caddy and the only right hand drive American car i have had. But i have had many American car's in my youth, well mid 20s to mid 30's. Over the years a 82 and 88 Mustang, and three Firebirds and two Z28's and a 69 Pontiac Lemans,that was my last American car that was pure weekend use, that was in the mid to late 1990's, and they were all left hand drive but the thing with them was for me, the wheel was on the wrong side so over taking on some roads were a tad iffy as once off the highways, some roads can be a tad narrow. But i got use to it after a while. But after almost a 14 year gap it is great to be back in a American built car and a Cadillac.

[Cadillac Jim]

I kind of like the idea of a left-hand shift myself, because, as a right-handed person, I would prefer that my right hand remain on the wheel while I shifted. The best answer IMHO is a paddle-shift with manual transmission control and efficiency but with both hands - and the eyes - uninterrupted by the shifting operations. And, let a computer or two handle the clutch and throttle in the shift far better than any human could. Second best is a paddle-shift automatic, with some loss in a torque converter.

Of course, a CVT seems like the beast answer. But, there are still major disadvantages to a CVT in a high-performance car:

• So far as I know, no one makes a CVT to handle horsepower ratings of 200 hp (150 kW) or more.
• CVTs are expensive, sometimes extremely expensive, relative to similarly performing five and six speed automatic transmissions that have similar specifications.
• Life of CVTs under sustained difficult conditions such as NYC traffic, San Francisco hilly urban terrain, highway travel in mountainous terrain such as WV, CO, and parts of many other states, etc. is not seemingly unlimited as is that of a well-cooled five speed or six speed automatic or manual transmission.
• Repairability and maintainability of any currently available CVT is specious, with few or no spare parts, even gaskets, available to dealers, rebuilders, or anyone else. Internal parts are rare or nonexistent and the few examples seem to be confined to major subassemblies that are horribly expensive. Replacement cost is, anecdotally, about three times that of a conventional transmission for the same year, make and model of car.

Since current CVTs are derived from transmissions designed for small hybrid or electric cars, the commercial product awaits maturity and designs for higher horsepowers and RPMs. The hybrid SUV transmission developed jointly by GM and BMW should provide a jump-start for CVT transmissions for performance cars, and is likely an enabling technology for the Tesla, which bodes well for a CVT in our near future.