Help us car shop......

[infinite monkey]

You know, my car has some setting that you can shift it if you want. I've never used it. Where is the clutch? How does it work? I'd forgotten about it until you posted that.

[HungLikeJesus]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

You know, my car has some setting that you can shift it if you want. I've never used it. Where is the clutch? How does it work? I'd forgotten about it until you posted that.

The Audi uses an S tronic transmission. Here's the description from Wikipedia:

The Direct-Shift Gearbox (German: Direkt-Schalt-Getriebe[1]), commonly abbreviated to DSG,[2][3] is an electronically controlled dual clutch[2] multiple-shaft manual gearbox, in a transaxle design - without a conventional clutch pedal,[4] and with full automatic,[2] or semi-manual control. The first actual Dual Clutch transmissions derived from Porsche in-house development for 962 racing cars in the 1980s.
In simple terms, it is two separate manual gearboxes (and clutches), contained within one housing, and working as one unit.[2][3][5] It was designed by BorgWarner,[4] and was initially licensed to the German automotive industry concern Volkswagen Group (which includes the Volkswagen Passenger Cars, Audi, SEAT, Škoda, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, Porsche, and Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles automotive marques), with support by IAV GmbH.[citation needed] By using two independent clutches,[2][5] a DSG can achieve faster shift times,[2][5] and eliminates the torque converter of a conventional epicyclic automatic transmission.[2]

...
Operational introduction

The internal combustion engine drives two clutch packs.[2][4][5] The outer clutch pack drives gears 1, 3, 5[2][4] (and 7 when fitted), and reverse[2] — the outer clutch pack has a larger diameter compared to the inner clutch, and can therefore handle greater torque loadings. The inner clutch pack drives gears 2, 4, and 6.[2][4] Instead of a standard large dry single-plate clutch, each clutch pack for the six-speed DSG is a collection of four small wet interleaved clutch plates (similar to a motorcycle wet multi-plate clutch). Due to space constraints, the two clutch assemblies are concentric, and the shafts within the gearbox are hollow and also concentric.[5] Because the alternate clutch pack's gear-sets can be pre-selected[2][4][5] (predictive shifts enabled via the 'unused' section of the gearbox), un-powered time while shifting is avoided[2][5] because the transmission of torque is simply switched from one clutch-pack to the other.[2] This means that the DSG takes only about 8 milliseconds to upshift.[3][4] In comparison, the sequential manual transmission (SMT) in the Ferrari F430 Scuderia takes 60 milliseconds to shift,[18] or 150 milliseconds in the Ferrari Enzo.[3] The quoted time for upshifts is the time the wheels are completely non-powered.

[glatt]

These drive by wire cars make me nervous. You don't hear about the acceleration problem in cars any more, but I think it's just because the press moved on to the next scare story. Give me a mechanical connection to the throttle and to the transmission and I'm happier. All this routing the driver inputs through the computer seems unnecessarily complicated. What happens when a neutrino hits one of the critical paths in the processor and the driver's inputs corrupted?

[tw]

Originally Posted by glatt

All this routing the driver inputs through the computer seems unnecessarily complicated.

Your car is already a computer network. The steering computer is not the computer that runs an engine or that controls the electric windows. Yes, even windows are now computerized. Often using a technology pioneered by Intel in the 1970s - CAN bus.