“Manuals are the best!” cries the diehard car enthusiast. “I like autos, and I hate clutch pedals!” says the city driver. That’s all well and good, but I have a different question for you today. I want to know the worst transmission you’ve ever driven.
Transmissions can suck for all kinds of reasons. Maintenance is perhaps one of the foremost. Even the greatest manual transmission is hopeless if the shifter bushings are worn out, the cables are fraying, or the clutch has been burnt to smithereens. Similarly, a once-smooth auto box can end up choking on its own fluid after hundreds of thousands of miles without a filter change.
Those are all valid reasons to hate a specific transmission. But you might also hate a certain transmission in perfectly good condition. That, my friends, is very much the case for me. At least, I think so.
Enter the K13 Nissan Micra. This thing is a hot box of sick. I hate it from morning to dusk. I hate it from dusk to dawn. Pretty much whatever my goddamn watch says, I hate this goddamn automobile. The transmission is at the heart of it.
Snap back to 2015. I was flying interstate to interview with a major automaker. I wanted to be an engineer! I’d passed the first round of phone interviews, but now I had to fly over to do the in-person group interview. They weren’t interested in me quite enough to pay my way over there, so I had to cover flights, a hotel, and a hire car all on my own. I chose the cheapest option— a compact with a manual transmission.
When I got to the Budget desk, they kept pushing me to spend $15 on upgrading to an auto. I refused three times. They eventually relented and handed me the keys to a Nissan Micra. They’d run out of manual cars, and they were trying to make me pay for the upgrade. Charming.
I jumped in the car, put it in drive, and headed out on the highway. Immediately, the horror was apparent to me. My memory says it had a godawful CVT driving the front wheels. The engine ripped up to high RPM and just wailed away like a hair dryer as this thing inched its way toward the 100 km/h (62 mph) speed limit.
My memory may be wrong. Checking old specs pages suggests that the K13 Nissan Micra actually came with a four-speed auto in Australia. Maybe I got a weird rental fleet delivery CVT version, as that’s certainly how the transmission was behaving. Alternatively, it’s possible I just had a really crappy Micra with a slipping automatic transmission that kept getting stuck in gear.
In any case, that car and its transmission sucked. I got the job, though! In any case, that was the worst transmission I’ve ever driven. Now, I want you to tell me yours. Get at it!
Image credits: Nissan
OK, legitimately the Oldsmobile Slim Jim transmission in my first car. I know it was old at the time I had it, but it had been maintained fairly well, just wasn’t great.
I was a quality engineer at Chrysler in the mid-2000s, working on FWD platforms, and the Jatco CVT in the PM/MK was then and is still now the worst transmission in a new car that I think I’ve used.
Worst shifter goes to my first boss’s 914 – it was the first Porsche I’d driven, so it took….some getting used to.
Maybe not the worst transmission in the world, but my mind immediately goes to the 5-speed manual in a 1980s Saab 900. Don’t get me wrong, Saabs are cool and my family had at least 5 of them over the years. But for someone who had gotten used to the stick shift in various Hondas and Nissans, the Saab transmission was like forcing a broomstick through a bucket of tennis balls—vague, rubbery, imprecise, and weirdly fragile feeling.
Even when I graduated to a early 2000s Subaru WRX, which isn’t the smoothest of manuals, it felt like whipped cream compared to my stepfather’s 900 SPG.
But would I own an old Saab? Absolutely. In some cases, the roughness just is part of the overall appeal.
As the owner of an old Saab (’85 SPG), I find this curious. I have points of reference on far-apart poles of shift feel – my Sentra SE-R has a great, modern snick-snick shifter. My ’80 911 has…well, it has a 915, which even in its best condition feels like shifting a stick in a bucket of pasta (mine is significantly better with a Seine GateShift). The Saab’s gearbox is certainly not like that of a modern Japanese car’s, but it’s not bad at all. And you’re right about being part of the overall appeal – it fits the rest of the car.
VW Eos with the 6-speed DSG. Felt like riding a horse below 10 mph.
The Dodge Caliber had a CVT so bad I asked the salesman why it was behaving so strange, kind of implying it was broken.
An early 90s Honda gave out and would blink in D and go in limp mode. So you had to start out in 1 and then go to D where it basically stayed in second or third or whatever.
Any three speed slushbox in a 1973-1988 4 cylinder car. Any manufacturer, any model, available in the US.
Special mention for any CVT, especially if it says Nissan on it.
You can extend that to 1991 for sure. Wife had a Dodge shadow as described. Although as someone said elsewhere the trans wasn’t necessarily bad, just combined with that engine.
Shifted 2-3 at about 50, had no guts at merge speed. But wanted to go from 70->80 with the smallest touch of the pedal.
One stands out above all: the trans in a diesel Smart that made up most of the Car2Go fleet around here a few years ago.
It had the finesse of an overworked airport gate agent with the subtlety of a caffeinated toddler. Attached to a wheezy buzz saw of an underpowered engine, it made navigating hills a schizophrenic mix of random gear changes.
The trans in any number of rental fleet-grade compact four-bangers I’ve rented takes second place.
From an unpleasant driving experience: Jatco JF011E CVT in a rental Dodge Caliber. Couldn’t decide on a ratio. Would continuously drone up and down at various RPM on the highway. Lethargic launch. Did not seem to aid in fuel efficiency very much. Kind of a prototypical unpleasant CVT experience.
From a reliability standpoint: Chrysler 41TE in a late 1990s Dodge Caravan. Two automatic transmission failures resulting in replacements, with the third limping when the vehicle was scrapped. Shifted my parents to Japanese-branded vehicles permanently.
Hands down the PowerShit in the Focus. Had mine 4 years and lemon-lawed it with ~46k on it. Every 10,000 miles I had to get the clutches replaced on mine and at the last change before I turned it in, they noted blue fluid was leaking from somewhere near the clutches.
Let’s not forget the Tom Waits song Ol’ 55 (made famous by The Eagles) which he said was about his buddy Larry Beezer driving home from his girlfriend’s place in Pasadena in a ’55 Cadillac that would only go into reverse.
EXCELLENT song. I’m going to link to it in Discord.
I wouldn’t say that I hate it, but I’m not crazy about the transmission in my 2021 Volvo V60. This is the first car I’ve driven with a modern automatic with more than 4 forward gears. I just feel like it’s always trying to shift gears at some inopportune time (eg, while I’m in the middle of a turn into traffic). I don’t know how other 8/9/..-speed autos are, but this one feels deeply unintuitive to me.
I’ve definitely noticed that modern autos try to keep the engine in a relatively slim RPM range, and achieve this by shifting a lot.
I much prefer driving an older 3/4 speed auto attached to an engine with a flat torque curve, where I can let the engine do the work instead of the transmission.
ZF5 manual in a 1988 460CI F250. The 3rd gear synchros wear out quick and were long gone by the time we got the truck. 1st is granny gear and 5th is overdrive so you start in 2nd, either double-clutch or *CRUNCH* into 3rd, get up to speed and then into 4th. I could usually finesse it on the flat if the truck was unladen, but ask it to work (uphill, load in the bed, pull a trailer) and it would fight you the whole way.
Due to the case design, that particular model was apparently a pain to rebuild, instead of working piece by piece you had to basically turn it on its end, give it a whack and let everything fall out.
This is a close match really, there are 2 contenders.
One is my trucks 4l80e before it got a rebuild. It had a solenoid that was toast and would only drive in either reverse or 2nd gear.
The other is the CVT from a 18 or 19 Nissan Sentra. What a miserable little car.
I think I have to give the honors of worst transmission experience to the Nissan though. The 2nd gear only experience wasn’t that bad since the rear end gears were super tall and the engine had plenty of power. The Nissan seemed to groan in agony when asked to do even moderate acceleration.
2015 Fiat (Ram) ProBastard (yes, I know it’s “ProMaster,” but I refuse to call it that). The company I worked for at the time had two aging Sprinter vans and wanted to replace them. They bought one ProBastard first to see how it would work as a replacement, and I hated it immediately about 20 minutes into my first drive because of the transmission. It was their goofy “manu-matic” or whatever it was called, and I could not pay that damn thing to find the right gear at the right time.
I learned right away to not drive it the same way I had become accustomed to driving the Sprinters, because that transmission would never find the right gear in anything resembling “snappy” driving. On the first morning, after a near-miss or two simply turning left across traffic as the engine lugged in too high a gear, I had to consciously remind myself that I needed to drive like an old man in a gigantic RV. It had the driving dynamics of an overgrown electric golf cart with a low charge.
Add in how the latch for the rear barn doors broke after less than three weeks – a pretty important detail on a delivery van – and I told my bosses that they were absolutely nuts if they bought a second one to replace the other Sprinter. Which is exactly what they did.
So if any of you own a Sprinter van that you use for work that is getting a little long in the tooth, and you are considering replacing it with the Fiat/Ram “equivalent” (term used EXTREMELY LOOSELY), my recommendation from experience is this: invest the money in a frame-off restoration of your old Sprinter van instead. You will end up with a better vehicle, and over its lifespan, you will probably end up dollars ahead as well – by not missing work due to busted door latches if no other reason.
Worst: Any CVT really. Add on the terrible reliability and it’s any wonder why automakers still try to push this into their cars.
Close second: The Aisin 8sp in the gen 2 cayenne. Yes, it’s the same as in the toyota landcruiser and “reliable”, but it’s drive like s***. Cayenne tuning is optimized for fuel savings, so it upshifts immediately in its quest to reach 8th gear, all while going maybe 40mph. It also shifts with such laziness, that rpm’s will hang in between 1-2 and 2-3 with the car seemingly not accelerating. Common complaint on rennlist, all met with the “sigh, normal” response. When paired with the anemic VR6 motor, truly a terrible combo. The TTv6 and TTv8 engines hide some of the faults of the tranny. The ZF 8sp in the gen 3 cayenne is SO much better.
CVTs are popular for mpg, emissions, smoothness, and they’re cheaper than other transmissions. They can be less terrible as in the WRX, but they’re still pretty lame.
The fact that CVTs make the engine drone, are slow to take off without a physical first gear, and are boring as hell aren’t all that important to manufacturers. They have other priorities.
It was definitely a CVT in India. There’d never been a (successful?) mainstream CVT car in India before, so the marketing made a huge deal out of it. My Gran has one of the facelifted ones. It drives OK.
I can’t make my mind about the absolute worst but here are the ones I despise the most:
-Jatco CVT: a cousin owned a Caliber and I owned a B16 Sentra for about 6 months. I grew tired of all the droning and no acceleration.
-Chevy Aveo 4 spd: I drove 2 rentals and they were the worst cars to take on the hwy. 4th was for coasting only and the poor transmission would violently downshift to 2 everytime I needed to pass another vehicle
-Ford Powershift: Owned a 1st model year Fiesta from 47K to 90K. It never needed a clutch but the lurching, hesitation and clunkiness in city was a constant. It behaved ok in hwy, though
Eaton ultrashift automated manual semi truck transmission. Instead of designing an automated manual from the ground up like Detroit Deseil, Eaton slapped a computerized clutch and shift module on a normal manual. And boy does it not work. Eats its clutch, shifts hard, computer bricks, can’t stay in the power band, manual mode is severely neutered. Only way to drive it is foot to the floor, or it gets confused. But then, torque flings the cab side to side, so the ride is hell.
Worst auto, probably the automated-clutch manual in the second gen Smart Fortwo. As smooth as falling down a flight of stairs and took ages to change gears.
Special mention to the dual clutch in the Giulietta I used to have. It was smooth and “fast enough”, but the programming seemed to have been done by a lunatic: always on the wrong gear. An auto I drove a significant amount of time in manual mode (even when “not” in a mountain road).
Worse manual: Abarth 500. The diagonal changes (i.e. 2-3 and 4-5) were impossible to execute quickly. All made even worse because the car was awful and boring. A big disappointment.
My first car was a ‘67 Plymouth Valiant. With an automatic with the reverse gear non-operational. My left thigh muscles got a good workout while going backwards the door open, in Neutral. Much fun doing parallel parking.
For a brief period, Audi offered a CVT in the A4. A friend got one. After I drove it once, the only question I had for him was “did you even test drive this first?”. He didn’t keep it long. I think Audi even offered a buyback or something on those.
I tried driving a semi once. The shift pattern resembled a maze. I never did find the cheese.
The Multitronic with diesel wasn’t that bad. At least in gentle driving. I guess it benefit from the diesel’s low-down torque.
The awful, awful, awful 3 speed auto from my 1986 Ceira wagon. Terrible all around, but the shift from second to third took roughly a half hour. Hateful thing.
I miss my 86 ciera, but with that 3 speed i think i spent about 2/3 of my time driving it in 1st gear just thinking “GOOO PLEASE ITS NOT THAT BIG A HILL”
1st place: the Ford Focus hatchback I had as a rental with the awful Powershift auto. This thing had less than 30k on the clock and driving around a parking lot at low speeds was jerking around like I was bad at driving a manual. I very much liked the car otherwise but the transmission was 100% a deal breaker.
2nd place: the CVT in my late aunt’s Caliber SXT. It embodied everything that people hate about a CVT.
Dodge
FartDart (last gen). Made of rubber. Maybe it was the entire drivetrain. Dunno. It was the only automatic that I could induce a lurching/bouncing cycle like you can do by bogging a manual.Second place is my new Subaru OB XT. The CVT seems work like it has a bad torque converter. Shudders the first 10 MPH, especially making L & R turns, then locks up suddenly. Hitting the gas to make a pass seems to unlock before pounding back into lock. Coming to a stop it simulates 4-5 downshifts in the last 20 MPH, inducing a nice little head nodding motion.
The engine and CVT seem to be locked in a battle when driving slowly. CVT trying its best to keep the engine below 1200 RPMs where it can barely accelerate the car. Add enough gas and the turbo kicks in with with umph. Best to not try to drive conservatively.
It’s going to the dealer this week to have it looked at.
Was the Dart a dual clutch? If it was and was the same (or related to) as the one Giulietta I can understand. Put me off automatics on affordable cars.