CVT Tranny

Maintenance/Repairs
1

I have been looking for a new car to replace my totaled Corolla. Most have CVT tranny with 1 speed (?). How fast can I go with just 1 speed?

2

CVTs don’t have one speed- it is more like an infinite number of gears. Who told you they only have one speed? They are incorrect.

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3

The term CVT stands for Continously VARIABLE Transmission, which means it has an infinite number of “gears”. So it’s like a speed bike which constantly shifts gears up and down without you having to do anything. This results in better fuel economy.

4

Actually there is a plethora of choices out there with regular automatic trannys. I’d personally avaoid the CVT trannys until they have a few more years of empirical data behind them. Although the technology has been in development for a very long time, the true test of their long term reliabillity can only come from their having been in the hands of consumers for a number of years.

5

I was looking at the specifications & it says 1-speed CVT transmission. Maybe it was a mis-print.

6

Just a note: I bought my Nissan Rogue about 2 weeks ago. It has a CVT and although it’s a new model of car, it is based on the Nissan Altima and Sentra designs that have been out there for quite a while. I am very happy with it so far.
Good luck!

7

Think of a CVT as having one large cone-shaped gear. When you need more power, the matching gear slides to a wider part of the cone. When you need less power, the matching gear slides to a narrower part of the cone. So, technically, it might be a single gear but it functions as though it has an infinite number of gears.

8

This is the way automatic transmissions were supposed to be; automatic. Some of them gain a lot of speed when going downhill but it’s great to go uphill without the transmission shifting in and out of overdrive. I used to just love that. The gas mileage was way better than I would have expected the other transmission to get. The engine power was a lot more also. There was no misprint even though the shifter could have 1,2,3, on the indicator. It was sort of an exaggeration.