Quote:
Originally Posted by Tcoat
Did you totally miss the theme of the song or has age just made your brain reverse it?
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You win and I should know better. You guys are just a tribal group that have tribal beliefs that support your choices notwithstanding logic and objectivity and open minded considerations. So I'll try to explain "ride quality" in more specific terms even though you will not accept it in your very parochial tribal mentality.
When you ride in a car, there are a bunch of sensory inputs -- how smooth the car feels over bumps, how comfortable the seats are, how loud the car is, road noise, how smoothly the transmission shifts, and how much you are isolated from the road. These elements are not mutually exclusive to the concept of ride quality. A Rolls is going to have much better "ride quality" than a BRZ. You ride in a Rolls, and you can't even feel or hear the transmission shifting.
Now none of us expects to have that kind of ride quality in a sports car. But even with sports cars, the ride quality of a Cayman is far better than the ride quality of a BRZ. Ride quality is far more than spring rate and dampers. One person here said that his wife didn't like the harshness of the ride of this car. I recommended a gel cushion (the same is true for my wife), and it improved the "ride quality" tremendously.
A smooth ride on the track does not mean you make the shifts disappear so you don't even feel them. In fact, you want to shift as fast as possible when accelerating. I'm sure none of you have ever downshifted where you actually feel the jerk of the engine, right? When I'm accelerating with a manual transmission, I actually like to shift as quickly as I can -- to me that's part of the fun. To my wife, it is a jerky ride with poor ride quality. She's right, of course. Because ride quality is the agglomeration of several sensory inputs, an automatic almost always "feels" smoother than a manual. Even the psychological impact of seeing the shift vs. not seeing the shift affects the brains perception of ride quality.
The genesis of this discussion was to a guy who was considering a BRZ with an automatic transmission because of fewer shifts and ride quality as a daily driver in traffic. I guess I should be used to the fanboy reaction to anything that disagrees with anything that even slightly denigrates your choices in a car. Looking at things with open minds and with new perspectives is just not a part of this group. I was hoping to give the OP a different perspective on this car -- because mine is different than yours and I happen to like my BRZ.
So, king of the forum, you can be the Fox News host of the 86 world. I'm outta here. This is my last post.