Potential Clutch wear on manual cars
Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 9:48 am
Pulsar like most of new cars has a very high (tall) first gear. Ratios that were used for large diesel engines with huge torque are now being used in very small petrol engines with turbo. On Pulsars there does not seem to be much difference in ratios between a diesel and petrol models. All done in the name of fuel efficiency . However it puts a lot of pressure on the clutch and stories are around of relatively new cars (not Pulsars , but Micras in case of Nissan) suffering from premature clutch failures. This issue is well known to the transmission engineers who in designing the dry plate DSG ( Nissan don't use this technology) come up with 7 or 8 speed version where the first two gears are very low when compared to the manual transmissions with only 6 ratios. It will be interesting to see how the clutch fares on a Pulsar.