What is a Tiptronic Gearbox?

If you are thinking it sounds a bit Germanic, you’d be right. It was a term used by Porsche to describe its new sports automatic in the 911, and was first seen in 1990. If the driver wanted to select gears manually, they could pull the gearlever over from the D position into a separate gate for the M mode. They could then ‘tip’ the lever forward to go up the gears, or ‘tip’ it back to go down the cogs. It was a new trick for an automatic gearbox at the time, and made the two pedal version of the 911 more involving to drive when the mood took the driver. And yet for the other 98 per cent of the time, they could just whack it in D and have the convenience of an automatic transmission taking care of all the shifting on the way to and from the office. 

Other car manufacturers slowly adopted the idea of the Tiptronic gearbox, giving it their own name. Most included some kind of ‘tronic’, like BMW’s Steptronic, Hyundai with Shiftronic, Volvo had the Geartronic, and Mitsubishi with Sportronic, though they are all based on the same principles.

At first they all used the gear lever to initiate manual shifting while there was no clear consensus on whether you should pull the lever back or push the lever forward to change up the gears. While it seems logical to push it forward to shift up, and pull back to go down the gears, when you are diving in a spirited manner it actually works better the other way; pulling it back to go up the gears, and pushing it forward to go down. The latter is particularly true when you are braking for a corner and need to shift down. Some, like Mercedes Benz, thought it was a good idea to have the stick move side to side to change gears, though that was truly terrible to use.

The next step in the evolution of the Tiptronic was to add some form of switch to the steering wheel to initiate gear shifts. This meant the driver could enter the manual mode of the Tiptronic gearbox by pulling the gearlever over into the manual gate, but then they could keep their hands on the wheel to change gears. Manufacturers played around with different shift buttons over the years. Porsche for instance had a little rocker button on the steering wheel spoke to begin with and other companies played around with other sorts of buttons you could push and prod. None were really that good however and were superceded by shift paddles. These flappy paddles work simply and effectively, pull the left one for a down shift and the right one for an upshift. 

Initially the Tiptronic gearbox was still inferior to the manual transmission when it came to outright performance. For models that had both the option of a Tiptronic or manual, it was always the latter that had a faster 0-100km/h time. Fuel consumption was usually better for the manual car too. Early examples of Tiptronic style gearboxes didn’t always shift in a sporty manner, with gearchanges taking their time to happen, especially downshifts. And sometimes the gearbox programming would override your manual input anyway.

However over the past 10 years, the automatic transmission has surpassed the manual in terms of both efficiency and speed. Virtually all performance models offer an automatic type transmission only. Manual gearboxes are becoming a rarity. Autos now have much faster shifting speeds in their manual/Tiptronic mode than you could ever achieve shifting the gears yourself. Purists still argue the manual gearbox makes a drive more involving, but for speed and efficiency, the Tiptronic style auto has surpassed it.