How to Enhance Gear Shift Feel of North-South Transmission Layout 2016-01-2357
Globalization has intensively driven focus of car manufacturers on comfort and ergonomics. Luxuries are becoming essential features of product mix. Customer’s expectations and desires are changing because of cut throat competition and increasing variety of options. In order to sustain in marketplace, OEM has to be competitive while providing features and options with appropriate quality.
Vigorously changing dimensions and definitions of comfort level, luxury and aesthetics has driven the intense focus of OEM’s on customer touch points, customer touch points are those components of vehicle which customer accesses while driving the vehicle and they play vital role in generating drive feel of vehicle. Customer’s drive feel about the vehicle is most complex and critical factor and is of subjective nature. Now days drive feel is an important aspect of product differentiation.
Gear shift feel is very crucial touch point in overall drive feel of vehicle. Customer desires overall Gear shift quality to be best in class for any transmission. Gear shift feel is very difficult to define because of diversities in customer aspirations and demands; many times these demands are of conflicting nature for e.g. demand of light shifting force and click feel, firmness and non-scratchy shift feel etc.
In this paper different parameters of GSQ (Gear Shift Quality) and their effects on gear shift feel is explained with help of math model or relation matrix. Along with this also some practical cases explained where different shift feels were obtained on same gearbox by altering choice of shifting mechanism.
This paper throws light on how to enhance this shift feel by using different combinations of damper bushes and spring stiffness and describes experimentation and procedures used to define and enhance the Gear Shift Feel and get over classic shift feel problems like stickiness, scratchiness etc.
