DSG folk

Chat about your 2018+ AW/BZ model Polos here!
david.stark
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DSG folk

Post by david.stark »

Thought I'd create a topic for us DSG folks to discuss our thoughts and for others to ask questions :D

This is only my 2nd automatic car and the last one I had was a Freelander 2 which was of course a torque converter box. I have always preferred manuals and enjoyed the involvement but since taking on my new job which involves 12 hour shifts and queuing traffic, coupled to my occasional back problems, I found the auto appealing. The DSG box also gives economy as good as the manual (in theory) and certainly better than torque converter boxes.

I am really pleased with it and its made my commute much more relaxed. The gear changes are like pure silk and only noticeable under kick down but I make a point of switching stop/start off until I am approaching traffic or lights where I can utilise it because the bloody thing cuts the engine when stationary at roundabouts giving way! Very awkward when your chance to go comes and you are waiting for the engine to fire up!

I have got the technique right now to avoid the lag that you get when setting off. Basically, if you hold the brake pedal down until the point when you need to accelerate, there is a slight lag before you zoom off. However, if for example you spot the last car coming from your right at a roundabout and your chance is coming, you just release the brake pedal and the lag is over with whilst said car is going past and your car begins to creep forwards. Then hit the go pedal and you zoom off instantly.

The acceleration is definitely easier and feels much faster than a manual too. Bearing in mind my car is the 95ps TSI and has no sporting pretensions at all, it should be destroyed on acceleration by a typical diesel manual rep car for example. However, I have found that in real world city centre driving between sets of lights, it zooms off so promptly that Mr Rep in his diesel manual who is poised in the overtaking lane, cannot quite understand how the little Polo has zoomed off ahead.

They say even a pro driver cannot change gear as fast as the DSG box, so the majority of drivers out there will change gear slower still hence why my Polo feels so zippy under acceleration.

I am aware that some owners of other VW's have had issues with DSG boxes and that they are very expensive to repair but my car is brand new so at least I have 3 years peace of mind with the warranty.

I have tried manual mode but don't plan to use it unless some circumstances dictate that it would be better to use manual mode. Perhaps if we get snow this winter I can utilise it to lock a given gear (got winter tyres ready anyway). S mode means faster progress than D and I use that at very busy roundabouts where I need to get gone really quickly.

Thumbs up from me thus far :D
mike sel
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Re: DSG folk

Post by mike sel »

Hi

Polo SEL 116DSG. I have driver mode, which I think is just a button by the gear leaver, I assume other polos still have the 4 options but just in the infomat system?

Anyway I digress, the DSG auto. I give it a thumbs up, as a manual driver coming into the DSG I was wondering whether the extra £1400 was worth spending over the 6 speed manual. To be honest I am still not sure. I would love auto stop start to be set as off as standard then the button used to activate it. I also push the start button and then push the next button to switch the auto stop off as the very next thing. Yes I have found that taking your foot off the break a second before you actually want to go works. Having the driver mode in ECO got me 64mpg on a 60mile run (the DSG box in eco mode coasts when you take you foot off of the noise peddle), and regularly gets me late 50s (that's with climate control auto & aircon off). Under normal mode with climate on auto I am getting around the 50mpg. DSG smooth gear changes, pulls well, its no rocket ship but with DSG shifted down to sport the engine makes a great raspy kind of noise and the car does seem quicker than the reported 9.5 seconds from 0-62.

So in my DSG polo my summer start up procedure in the order described is:- pre set the personal hotspot on my iPhone, plug in iPhone, foot on break, check DSG is in park, push start button, set driving mode to eco, switch auto stop start off, open up satnav and punch in destination post code, check traffic situation on the in car VW carnet, set my tunes and im away. Yes it sounds more like a pre flight check but it gets the car configured to how I want it and it does only take a few seconds to do and if im low on fuel I check the local fuel costs on the carnet and get it to take me to the nearest cheapest petrol station.

In the winter, Probably after push start button, switch on heated seat, demist windshield, switch on rear demister, then back to my routine.

TBH when I did my flying lessons I learnt the value of setting the aircraft up properly before you set off, its the same with a car, set it up properly and you will have no worries.
david.stark
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Re: DSG folk

Post by david.stark »

Ah yes, I remember the pre-flight checks well. The aforementioned Land Rover I once had was bursting at the seams with gizmos.

Variable settings heated seats (leather/alcantara), dual zone climate control, heated windscreen and so on. Now I live a simpler yet still more than happy existence in the SE. Remarkably refined little car though when compared to the Fiesta for example - Had several Fords over the years too.

Back to the subject in hand, one advantage of DSG over torque converter is they don’t suffer the temperature issue in winter. I thought the Freelander had developed a fault one morning when it was revving ridiculously high as I joined the A38 within 5 minutes of leaving home.

I switched to manual mode to ensure it was in 6th but it was revving like it was in 3rd or 4th. Fellow owners advised me that the box is doing that initially to get it up to optimal operating temperature. The fluid must have been cold due to the sub zero temperatures.
mike sel
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Re: DSG folk

Post by mike sel »

Ha

When I went in to collect my SEL they had a cancelled Polo white GTI in the showroom and I was offered it in stead of my SEL. it was a basic GTI and I was not sure I needed a 2ltr car with 30-40MPG. So I stuck with the SEL all tooled up Yes its a few seconds to carry out the configuration but its worth it, I do enjoy the car. :D
monkeyhanger
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Re: DSG folk

Post by monkeyhanger »

Speed of gear change is a half-truth. The DSG box is actually 2 gear boxes in essence, one for the odds and another for the evens. The box predicts what you want next - if you're in second and accelerating, the odds side will have 3rd ready, if you've slowed from 40 to 10mph, the odds side will be considering whether to have 1st ready. DSG gear change with the next predicted gear already in place, the change is something ridiculous like 20 milliseconds, however if you want to make a big change like from 6th to 3rd this require 3 gear changes from the DSG box as opposed to one action from the driver in a manual box. The manual option is much quicker than the DSG can do.

To get the gear ready and then changing to it, the DSG box is no quicker than a manual box in this regard. It is only much quicker when it has the gear already set up to switch to from the opposite box.
david.stark
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Re: DSG folk

Post by david.stark »

I understand what you are saying and defer to your knowledge but having experienced that kind of situation on the roads, it’s not something that has me thinking this is slow and I’m not happy.

As I say, I like manuals and have always had them bar the Freelander and if my circumstances were different, I think I’d have opted for one. DSG suits me better though and I like the 7 speed box rather than 5 in the manual. The 115ps has 6 of course.
mike sel
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Re: DSG folk

Post by mike sel »

The DSG is £1400 quid or thereabouts dearer. I think in hind sight I could have spent that money on LEDs and the sunroof kept my manual 6 gears and because its manual has std CC rather then the ACC that goes well with the DSG. Still I am not unhappy with the DSG, in fact its a great gearbox, it just does not work well with Auto stop start...bordering on dangerous. So its just remembering to switch off Auto stop every time. Hoping for a hack of switching off auto stop permanently. :shock:
SRGTD
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Re: DSG folk

Post by SRGTD »

mike sel wrote: Fri Aug 10, 2018 4:59 pm The DSG is £1400 quid or thereabouts dearer. I think in hind sight I could have spent that money on LEDs and the sunroof kept my manual 6 gears and because its manual has std CC rather then the ACC that goes well with the DSG. Still I am not unhappy with the DSG, in fact its a great gearbox, it just does not work well with Auto stop start...bordering on dangerous. So its just remembering to switch off Auto stop every time. Hoping for a hack of switching off auto stop permanently. :shock:
Really interested in people’s comments on the DSG in the Polo as I’m seriously contemplating it in my next car. I have a dodgy back, and manual gear changes can be painful on occasions. I really dislike stop start, and manually switching it off is part of my normal starting procedure. I will temporarily switch it back on though if I know I’m going to be stopped for a while, such as when I’m at traffic lights.
monkeyhanger
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Re: DSG folk

Post by monkeyhanger »

mike sel wrote: Fri Aug 10, 2018 4:59 pm The DSG is £1400 quid or thereabouts dearer. I think in hind sight I could have spent that money on LEDs and the sunroof kept my manual 6 gears and because its manual has std CC rather then the ACC that goes well with the DSG. Still I am not unhappy with the DSG, in fact its a great gearbox, it just does not work well with Auto stop start...bordering on dangerous. So its just remembering to switch off Auto stop every time. Hoping for a hack of switching off auto stop permanently. :shock:
It does work poorly with stop-start. I expected to reliably be able to feather the brakes for a soft stop and not stop the engine, but it is impossible to do reliably. The stop-start quite often kicks in just before the car comes to a complete stop if you do soft-stop.

Given the choice if available, I would've always gone for a manual. DSGs are 10% thirstier like-for-like in the real world (despite what the tests say) if you're good at anticipation/reading the road ahead and conserve your momentum/employ engine braking towards an obstacle that requires you to slow down or stop.

As previously said, they're only quicker at changing than manual if the next required gear is ready to slot in. I quite often maintain 40mph on a 40 road in 6th when in the Golf R, then I enter a 70mph road, drop to 3rd and hammer it to 70 (or do similarly for an overtake). That gear change from 6th to 3rd takes me probably 3/4 of a seond. Takes the DSG about the same per shift for a cog it hasn't go ready, so that same change is 6th>5th (20 milliseconds because 5th is ready) >4th (0.77s)>3rd (0.77s), so you're taking 2 and a half times longer. Of course, with DSG from a standstill, if you're using launch control, as you hammer 1st, 2nd is ready. As you milk 2nd, 3rd is ready before you red-line in 2nd, and if you redline 3rd, you're at about 85mph and risking your license!

You don't get the pops with the manual, and the "just enough"clutch is going to slip the moment you remap it (if that's your thing). Of course city driving is so much easier, no nursing teh clutch on a crawl.

Sp it's swings and roundabouts - from a standstill acceleration and city driving convenience at the expense of overtaking instant response and mpg. Luckily enough, the penalties aren't huge for the DSG, so the positives may well outweigh the negatives for most. I wondered whether i'd hate the DSG, but I don't. Maybe it'sbecause I don't have a choice with the Polo GTI, or maybe I haven't really experienced the DSG have a brain-fart yet to infuriate me.

My commute hardly has me waiting static, so turning off my stop-start probably won't have a big mpg bearing for me, and I do find all of the buttons on the Polo easy to access as they're set up for a RHD car (older VWs like MK5 Golf used to always keep the gearstick adjacent buttons on the LHS, whether the car was RHD or LHD. .
monkeyhanger
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Re: DSG folk

Post by monkeyhanger »

Today was the first day this week since Monday that I've driven the Polo GTI. I was away to another site of work Wednesday and Thursday, which meant getting a lift to work Tuesday to pick up a car from Enterprise, and return it Friday morning, getting a lift home. It was a hateful Renault Kajar - impressively frugal for such a large lump, but with horribly impractical interior design - which, among other things, put a brightly lit reminder in the roof console that the passenger airbag was on, right in your eyeline, and it was a bouncy-castle on wheels, with suspension sway bordering on dangerous in wind at motorway speeds. Makes you appreciate how well designed and executed VWs are.

Anyway, I thought i'd give driving the DSG manually a serious go as I drove an 18 miles round trip to pick the wife up from a disappointing Newcastle home match.

It really does seem hard work to maintain manual control 100% of the journey, knowing full well that the car can take care of all the gear changes itself. I'm not quite in tune with the ratios yet - in the manual Golf R, I can feel what the engine speed is and what gear i'm in for the given speed - i'm not quite there yet with knowing what the rpm is in 4th at 35mph , for example. Maybe it won't be long, the car has only done about 140 miles so far.

I don't find manual control on the DSG intuitive at all, although I have found today, slotting the stick in manual mode and going up/down with the stick a little more natural than the flappy paddle gears, although I really have to think about it, it is not in the least bit instinctive for me.

The throw between up/down from the rest position is far shorter than that of a manual box gear change, which in itself feels un-natural. It also feels less logical to more up gears by pushing up/away on the lever than pushing down/towards, but that is the way VW have set it up - push up changes up and push down changes down. Again, with perseverance, it might come more naturally.

I do feel that I was marginally more frugal than the automatic shifting, employing more engine braking than the auto mode of DSG would, and changing up quicker than the box would after a short burst of acceleration, when I knew that I didn't need to hold on to 4th or 5th as long as the box would, wondering if I was done with the need for a lower gear. Not enough in it to be bothered by savings to be made at the pumps.

I also experimented with stop-start being on or off. One thing I did notice in that regard was that when stop start is on and the engine has cut out, even with the brake pedal held on, the engine can and does fire back up when the car in front starts to move, even if the car in front is just shuffling forward as static traffic bunches up a little at a red light. So the ACC/City braking sensors must play a part in the detection of what the road users ahead of you are doing. That brief shuffle of static traffic bringing that car back up and running is annoying, when the cars shuffle up a foot and stop, and your engine is ready to go, yet you may have a long wait until you really want to move.

In the main, sustained manual control really doesn't seem worth the effort, for a brief override for a foreseeable situation unfolding (like an overtaking opportunity) then it can be worth it for minimal gains.
david.stark
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Re: DSG folk

Post by david.stark »

I can agree with that without even going to as much effort as you have but thanks for the in depth feedback.

I was literally nodding as I was reading it :lol: For me, I wanted the DSG because I didn’t want to change gear and the manual shift that it does offer just doesn’t compare to a manual gearbox and doesn’t feel right.

Happy to let the box do what I wanted it to do and leave manual mode for the rare occasion that we get snow.
johnpolo2
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Re: DSG folk

Post by johnpolo2 »

DSG all the way. The manual may be fun on a racetrack but not on our ever increasing crowded little island. Plus start stop in so much easier with DSG than with a manual set up.

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mike sel
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Re: DSG folk

Post by mike sel »

As I have said before for the two following reasons Auto stop start is off for me unless in in a long non moving que .

1. Delay in the restart at junctions.
2. When your stopped the car in front even thinks about rolling forward and the auto start fires up. So the front sensors clearly play a part in this process and can tell the car in front moved (even an inch).

IMHO Auto stop start just does not work well with the DSG. other than that I just love the DSG gearbox, a simple little tap back on the stick and your in sports, brilliant. :D
johnpolo2
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Re: DSG folk

Post by johnpolo2 »

Not sure if I've read you right but mine wouldn't fire up if the car in front moved . Is it a city emergency breaking feature?

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monkeyhanger
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Re: DSG folk

Post by monkeyhanger »

johnpolo2 wrote: Sun Aug 12, 2018 6:25 am DSG all the way. The manual may be fun on a racetrack but not on our ever increasing crowded little island. Plus start stop in so much easier with DSG than with a manual set up.

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I'd disagree with DSG stop-start vs a manual. Manual is so much more useable. There is no stop-start kicking in when you come to a stop unless you want it to. If you come to a stop and know those lights are about to change, or you're ready to exploit a gap at a busy roundabout, you keep the clutch dipped. If it's going to be a wait, you knock it into neutral and bring the clutch up. The car fires up again when you dip your clutch to get ready to select a gear. Much better, no messing about with soft stops and hoping that stop-start doesn't kick in anyway.
Last edited by monkeyhanger on Sun Aug 12, 2018 12:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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