My Thoughts On The Multimode Transmission

June 20, 2007

Hi, I’ve been lurking the forums for a while wanted to share my thoughts on the multimode transmission.

I never thought of buying anything else than a diesel with manual transmission, but a friend “ordered” me to test the MM gearbox. The only available test car with a MM transmission at the time was a 1.6. I was quite impressed with the smooth gear change, and also the manual override possibilities. Just the thought of the car handling the gearbox this smooth in all situations is really appealing.

But the quick change up to 5. gear was a disappointment. The low rpm torque of the gasoline engine makes just the slightest increase in speed really annoying. First it takes a second for the car to “understand” that you actually want to increase the speed, than you have to wait for yet another second for the gearshift, then finally the car accelerate. Like someone mentioned elsewhere in the forums, this is not something you want to happen in a roundabout or similar situations

Of course you can compensate for this time delay by manually downshifting in situations where a sudden acceleration is likely to happened, but all in all this made me think that this MM gearbox isn’t something I would order in combination with the gasoline engine.

That said I always liked manual transmission in a car, and then especially in combination with a high torque engine like modern diesel engines. Both for the joy of actually having something to do while driving, and the overall better reliability of a manual given that it is handled correct. I'm a manual-transmission guy really trying to find excuses for not buying an automatic, rather than the other way around.

But even I can’t deny that an automatic transmission is quite comfortable, and the majority seems to want an automatic transmission, which eventually may increase the second hand value of the car. Therefore it was nice to find a second Toyota dealer in the district witch had a 1.4 D4D Multimode available for testing. Boy was I surprised!

Not only was the power in that small diesel engine impressive, but the torque of the engine made the Multimode transmission really shine! The annoying wait for anything to happen was gone. With the impressive torque of the small diesel engine you are actually able to increase speed quite well without waiting for the gearbox to shift gears. Only when you had to increase speed “more than average” the gearbox needs to shift, which of course is understandable.

So there you have it, in two weeks I’m picking up my 1.4 D4D MM :)