Early in the 2000’s PSA cars received versions of Robotised – ‘piloted manual gearboxes’, in coincidence with renewed global popularity of these type of gearbox design.
Over the years these systems received tons of complaints and criticism, most of it due to misunderstanding, neglect and abuse of the system.
These systems employ an absolutely conventional 5 or 6 speed gearbox, from the MC or MA series, with added actuators, sensors and electronics to provide an automatic manipulation of the gearbox and cluthc mechanisms, mimicking a human behaviour. Here things start to be a bit more complex.
As we all know robots exist but to make a machine to behave as a human is a hard task – in our case the gearbox has to follow dynamic conditions – acceleration, deceleration, varying load, inclination, etc. The system achieves that by collecting sensor data and predicting the driving-drive style.
Sensodrive that came first in the C1-C2-C3, P-107/1007 was a fully electronic actuated system – using servo motors on the gearbox grid and a wear-adjusting servo actuated clutch.
Later systems – MCP, EGS and Fiat Comfort-shift – use a Hydro-pneumatic actuation, with a pressure accumulator and set of pressure transducers and valves to achieve a very smooth gearchange.
I personally owned over half a dozen cars with various versions of these gearboxes installed on them, and as I will elaborate here, they can be superior in economy and reliability to conventional planetary gearboxes, with the right service and simple maintenance.
Why do I like them:
for starts – they are mostly mechanical, thus the gearbox side of things is supposed to survive the full-life cycle of the car. Most of the faults occur in the hydraulics/electronic side of the gearbox – easily solved, with the gearbox in the car.
2. They provide the best economy compared to automatic gearboxes.
3. Even on a high-mileage vehicle, the only wear items are the clutch(and the DMF if installed), the concentric clutch bearing and the pressure accumulator(MCP/EGS)/clutch servo unit(Sensodrive). When I buy a car with the system installed, meant to have trouble some life I change these parts, and enjoy a smooth and dependable drive for 200k+ kms.