Now my car is broken in, I am experimenting with the Sport auto mode and trying to work out what makes it tick.

The service engineer at my dealer told me it has 5 modes that it selects based on your driving style. I find if I am aggressive on the throttle it basically red lines before shifting up. Often I find myself manually shifting up with paddle if I want to accelerate hard but not necessarily flat out i.e. I haven't found the happy medium where I can always rely on an auto shift up during hard acceleration if I don't want to red line!

The auto downshifts are amazing during hard breaking! Sometimes it will shift down 2 gears almost instantaneously! I haven't really tried sport plus yet - that joy to come!

Interested to hear your experience.

 

It sounds like you are describing Sport Plus- which is set to be like a manual transmission- that is you have to shift it manually unless you want to be near the red line. If so, and you prefer the PDK to shift for you at RPMs higher than "normal' mode, don't use Sport Plus- just use "Sport". If you don't have Sport Chrono and are indeed in Sport mode, just be aware that it is sensitive to throttle position and acceleration forces and being less aggressive will have it shift earlier.

 

Thanks Chuck.

I have Sport Chrono but I am definitely referring to Sport mode not Sport Plus.

 

Five sounds about right. I've never seen the technical docs on the PDK but the way we do such things is to use at least two levels of control. The lowest level uses a simple look-up table because it operates with tight time constraints. At some frequency interval like fifty times a second, the control circuit samples a bunch of system parameters and munges them into a single number. It uses that number as an address into a memory. The value at that address is a collection of control values. For example, one of the bits will be "initiate shift". That collection of values is called a map and will contain considerably more than five different values because it also has to account for the current state of operation. That's the lowest level and it's a very efficient technique so we can control very high-speed processes that way.

At the next level up, we have processes that make decisions about which map to employ. That's where a simple set of five maps might be used, but it's quite feasible to use five families of maps corresponding to five 'modes' described in service training, with titles perhaps like 'aggressive', 'relaxed', and three in-between levels. Then within each 'mode' would be categories like "entering a corner sequence" recognized by particular braking and steering inputs.

All that is subject to proprietary innovations of course, and is encrypted as well to make it difficult for aftermarket changes. We have other ways to do such things, but I infer something very like that is going on from my experience with my own PDK. We make global decisions about our own purposes by choosing to press the 'sport' or "sport plus" button, but from moment to moment the controller infers our immediate intent and uses that to select which family of control maps to apply.

Something we rarely discuss here is the need to calm down occasionally. Even Porsche drivers bring home new babies, transport sick loved ones, and pick up incredibly detailed and vertical pastries to be delivered to a party. I call that 'limousine' mode and the need for that mode is why we never owned automatic transmissions until the PDK. They are too badly managed and provide a lot more jolting than an experienced driver with a manual transmission. At least the ones they used to put into cars with sporting pretensions.

Yesterday, I had a pastry run and had to use 'limousine' mode by leaving both buttons off and using very smooth control inputs. By golly, the PDK recognizes variations within 'non-sport' as well. It was shiftly almost imperceptibly and even with traffic demands I managed to keep the g loads down to 0.3g max in any direction. As measured by pastry collisions.

Seriously, it was like running a spoon through whipped cream. Not dramatic and may not sell as many cars as a podium finish at Le Mans, but very good engineering to accommodate both ends of the performance range this well.

Gary

 

Great description, thanks.

A question: How quickly do the maps remember that it's me driving it after my wife has just borrowed it for a day using her limo-driving style?

 

Hard to say without seeing the technical docs because it's a design decision not forced by the technology. If it were my choice, the answer would be in the range of a few hundred seconds at most. And if nothing interfered with the choice, I'd use up an input identifying which key was used. In which case, the answer is "by the time you put it in gear."

Certainly, the transition from pastry mode to "coming home after a Porsche meeting where we raced Matchbox GT3's against a Carrera GT and a Gallardo" mode wasn't more than half a block.

Gary

 

Here is a link to a PDk feature I discovered that works in sport on or off:

http://www.6speedonline.com/forums/9...-pdk-blip.html

 

HOW DO YOU DEFINE "calm down"? DO YOU MEAN WHEN PSE IS OFF? Oh, ok.

 

 

Yes, blip works - tried it!

 

Is that cool or what?

 

I think so. But when I posted about it a few weeks ago, the only response was a private one, as if fearful of embarrassing me, that automatics, including the PDK for the sake of argument, have done that for years. The responder notably said the Tiptronics have 'always' done that.

It does not embarrass me to admit I haven't driven an automatic for at least twenty years and they sure didn't do this then. Am I really out of date that badly or is this the PDK-unique feature that it seems like to me?

Gary

 

Sorry I missed your post. My other cars (with the exception of an MGB) are automatics and they sure don't react to a blip

 

Oh, don't worry about the earlier post. Lots of other stuff was posted that day. I was just surprised at the private response I did receive: that this feature had been introduced and I'd never even heard of it. From what you say, it either is genuinely new to our PDK or at least rare.

I'm just glad to know it isn't all automatics, which implication really made me feel old.

Gary

 

I have had several automatics, including DB9. Never experienced blip before. If the cars had it, I never discovered it!