“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
I don’t recall ever driving a really bad transmission, but bizarrely the worst I’ve experienced was definitely the stick in an BMW E36 coupe, I think it was a 318i.
I’m sure that one in good condition is lovely to drive, but the one I drove felt like every single bushing in the whole car had simply fallen out, which made the transmission feel horrible.
Funny enough, the only other transmission I remember having negative thoughts about was also a BMW, this time an E91 (also a 318i). The transmission itself was fine, but I remember the clutch having absolutely no feel at all, which meant it was really not enjoyable. I’ve read that a lot of BMWs have a clutch delay valve, so I wonder if that’s what caused it.
My two favorite manual transmissions I’ve driven are the 5-speed in my brother’s old VW Up, which was incredibly mechanical feeling and satisfying to operate, as well as the 6-speed in my Mom’s Jeep TJ Wrangler 4.0, which is also very mechanical and satisfying, plus has a great feeling clutch pedal.
I normally drive an auto, but these are the two vehicles that made me understand why people enjoy driving a manual so much.
Base model Dodge Caliber rental car. One of the first production CVTs, and it was just awful.
JK Wrangler manual. Loose and vague with a long throw, and reverse on the wrong side of the pattern with a weak lockout gate that, combined with the slow nature of the beast and wrong damn engine for the platform (V6es have no place in applications that demand torque), means money shifts into reverse looking for another gear that isn’t there happen far too often for even the most experienced driver.
Nissan CVT in an x-trail (rental as well)
I love mischung
Probably my mom’s 2022 Explorer with the 10-speed. It’s pretty clunky at times, it’s programmed to lug the engine way too often at lower speeds, and it has a harsh shift as you come to a stop which makes it hard to stop smoothly.
I had to borrow a Caliber to make a parts run once. You could fully press the throttle down to the floor and let it off completely before the shitty CVT even realized you applied the throttle at all.
2012 Ford Focus with dual clutch
Worst shift? The 5 speed automated manual in the Proton Savvy. I worked for a driver training company that used these. 1.2 litres and 55kw of throbbing horsepower…of which the gearbox stole about 45kw. Acceleration in that car was practically non existent.
It also had a gear lever which let you shift gears sequentially, but had the tactile feel of flicking a light switch. And the shifter was upside down (push forward to change up, pull back to change down – a common fault with sequential shifters I’ve noticed).
The gearbox also used to overheat and go into limp mode if you so much as looked at it funny. All in all, deeply unsatisfying…
The VW Automatic Stickshift on the ’69 Karmann Ghia I had in college. It was basically a manual with a vacuum operated clutch that disengaged when you put your hand on the shifter. It would engage and disengage with a jerk and sapped what little power the VW flat four might have had. It was reliable enough, such as it was, in the time I owned it but stripped driving the car of the little bit of fun it had.
Ford PowerShit. Mine took a figurative shit on me at 130k during the pandemic, and it sat at the dealer for a year waiting on parts. I bought a new car long before that happened. It had been in for recall work on three separate occasions for that transmission and it never did shift right coming out of first gear. TCM fried when I changed the battery and that was that.
It’s a shame too, because I never had any other issues with that 2013 Fiesta and would probably still have it. It was great for eating highway miles and somehow managed close to 50 mpg on a trip to Colorado and back. It never did quite recapture that magic, but a year later it still pulled down 43 on the way to Arizona and back. Great car ruined by Ford’s inability to build a transmission for anything that isn’t a truck or Mustang.
My wife’s 2016 Focus is on its 3rd one. She had the tranny replaced twice under warranty. We are just driving it into the ground because resale value is nothing at this point.
I’m a Brit, so I learned on a manual, have always driven and owned manuals, and honestly find automatics hard to drive (I keep hitting the brake, thinking it’s the clutch, every time I think it should change gear). But I’ve probably driven less than 100 miles using an auto so I’m not the person to comment on them.
On the other hand, the worst manual gearbox I’ve ever used was on a hired Chevrolet (nee Daewoo) Matiz. It was a normal 5-speed, but it was geared completely wrong for the engine it was attached to (maybe a 1.4l 4-cyl?). Getting it up to motorway speed, you had to buzz the limiter in 4th to get it above 70mph, but if you shifted into 5th at that point it could only just keep that speed, if you hit a slight up hill, or a headwind, it would slow down and you’d have to drop back to 4th.
It would be too easy to say like a 1982 Volvo 240 because they did not really know how to build non-worthless automatic gearboxes in Sweden at that time.
So, I would have to say the Smart Fortwo, early 2000 models with the automated manual transmission. This provided the driver with an underpowered, lagging experience like few others.
Definitely late 70’s Jaguar XJ12. For some reason the Borg Warner automatic gearbox had the change-up speed and change-down speed exactly the same… drive along at that exact speed and it would constantly change between gears!
That’s the 3-speed auto in my Nissan Figaro!
But the rest of the car is just so wonderful, so I’ll live with it, have for 6 years now 🙂
Ford EcoSport, hands down. Felt like somebody else was working the throttle RE: downshifts. My usual easy burn from PHL around 476 to Willow Grove was an utter nightmare.
While I had the soul sucking experience of driving an automatic Chevette for my drivers training, the transmission was…competent. It was the engine/transmission combo that was gutless.
As far as bad transmissions, I can’t really say I have driven one. My in-laws’ Forester CVT? Not as fun as our Forester stick, but…not terrible, and quite solid on unplowed fire roads. The 9 speed in our Sienna? A little irritating during rolling stops, but otherwise passable and reliable. I’ve driven two 4L60s, and they put up with plenty of abuse.
I’ve driven several sticks and a variety of 3-5 speed autos, and they were….fine.
Yeah, plenty of boring transmissions, but no truly terrible ones.
2014 Subaru CrossTrek CVT. What a piece of hot garbage.
I’m sure 30-40 percent of the comments below will say the Ford PowerShit.
And I’ll agree. I drove a Fiesta once with only 60k on it and it was genuinely unpredictable.
A Citroen C2 Pluriel (I think) with the Automated Manual Transmission.
Hands down the worst driving experience of my entire decade long career or working on cars. I physically couldn’t get the car to drive up the ramps of our 4 post hoist because it couldn’t work out how to use it’s own gearbox to crawl at pace and occasionally would decide that neutral was what I was looking for, even while actively attempting to accelerate. It seems these transmissions shift by the method of sending a carrier pigeon back to France with a note directing the desired gear to a drunkard with a switch board and dial-uo internet who then sends the signal back to the car, which by that point has rolled backwards 3 city blocks despite being in D with the loud pedal on the floor.
Nissans, eh? I had a turd of an Altima in college where the transmission could never figure out what the hell it wanted to do. I ended up flooring it a lot just to trick it into actually speeding up.
I hope that car is a series of cheap toasters now, or maybe a target at a bomb testing range.
Most of my work fleet was made up of second gen Ford Transit Connects and not a single one of their CVTs made it past 45k before the belts gave up on life. Even when the vans worked, the transmission was totally gutless. You could stand on the accelerator, begging the transmission for enough power to get to highway speeds and it would scream back at you “no”
Any CVT, but specifically my mother in law’s 2019 Nissan Rogue that she loves. I’ve never had a car make so much vroom noise yet exhibit so little go. Zero balls.
For the driving experience, any number of CVT-equipped rental cars. The rubber-banding effect you get when trying to make a pass with moderate acceleration is only beat by the drone when you go full-throttle.
For reliability it’s got to be the Borg Warner T-5 that my 89 Camaro had. It was the supposedly improved “World Class” (Hah!) version and I grenaded 3 of those things; cracking or outright shattering 3rd gear each time, and had to rebuild one of them for bearing failure before that. Averaging less than 100k miles out of a transmission that’s only dealing with the ~170hp output of the 305 V8 is just sad. It did have great direct shifter feel when it worked though!
Had a brand new F*#d Focus for a rental car in Seattle. It had that crappy DCT. Even on steep hills, it wanted to shift into 2nd at 1 mph and the car about stalled every time it did that.
I used to own a ’67 C-10 pickup with a 3-on-the-tree and I would prefer driving that in the hills of Seattle over the DCT Focus.