Gadgetory

it's new the latest development and the industry a selector lever and dial replaced the standard gearshift control and here is just how simple driving can be with the marvelous new Mirko Matic Drive now used to be the driving an automatic was pretty brain-dead simple pull it out of park roll past reverse and neutral and stick it and drive and then push the pedal on the right when you desire a burst of speed for passing you just press the accelerator to the floor but the high-tech automatics today have a lot more nuance than that the shifters you find on the actual lever or on the paddles are not literally connecting you with the gears but they are connecting you with the software that runs the transmission you can get in there and just about call all the shots as if it was a manual except the actual guts of the transmission remains different than a manual now we're in a Mazda 3 which is pretty classic is today's high-tech automatics go you've got your drive mode over here manual position shifted there nothing too uncommon about that and you've got paddles on the wheel you can invoke a shift with these paddles wall in drives and it's a temporary shift so let's say I want a downshift now down to third or second gear the RPMs go up and then after about five six seconds it goes back into drive mode and drops down the RPM shifting up a gear if I move the lever here I can also put it into a manual or a sport mode now my shifts done either with the paddles or through this lever are sticky the car will hold the shift that I select all the way to red line and all the way down to engine lugs let's say I want to pull a lot of down shifts here I could run this thing way up there I am first gear 5000 rpm it'll hold that right to redline it's totally in my control and same thing can be done over here it's the lever it just replicates what the paddles are able to do now in this car as you can see I've got a paddle over here on the right for up shift there's another one over here on the left that's for downshift not every car does it that way some cars like Porsches for example come to mind they are bilateral there is a shifter on each side of the wheel that will do up or down shift depending which way you push it this is a little more common though so what's the best way to use this technology well several ways first well get an immediate burst of better acceleration when the car is geared for at the time snap it down a couple gears momentarily for five or six seconds it'll hold and then let the car go back in the drive for best fuel economy another way you're going up for a nice drive on a nice country windy road snap it over into manual or sport mode and choose your position either lever or paddles to get fully engaged in the drivetrain that's one of the nice benefits here here's another one you've got really challenging conditions gravel mud snow and for whatever reason you think the car is not handling it well sometimes it's really nice to have a more granular gear typically a lower gear to modulate your power on uneven surfaces