God Help Me, I Love Honda's Automatic Transmission For Motorcycles
God Help Me, I Love Honda's Automatic Transmission For Motorcycles
The allure of motorcycling is simplicity. A pared-down machine that thrusts you into the wind and weather, there to experience all the joy and agony of high-speed travel rushing against you. Modern automobiles push us further and further from the mechanical acts of driving; a motorcycle draws you right in close. God Help Me, I Love Honda's Automatic Transmission For Motorcycles.
Honda's been making dual-clutch motorcycles since 2010; the company also offers a similar gearbox in its ATVs and side-by-side utility vehicles. And Honda isn't the only manufacturer making automatic bikes: Yamaha offers a semi-automatic motorcycle with an automated clutch, and numerous scooters and scooter-like bikes offer CVTs. (Electric motorcycles are "automatic" in the sense that there's no shifting involved—they have a single gear and no clutch mechanism.) God Help Me, I Love Honda's Automatic Transmission For Motorcycles.
But until this spring, I had never ridden any form of automatic motorcycle. Then I spent a Sunday visiting my friend Rob Doyle, who oversees Honda's fleet of review motorcycles for the NYC area. For our day of riding, Rob fixed me up with a new Africa Twin, the latest iteration of Honda's legendary all-terrain adventure bike, with the $800 optional dual-clutch transmission. God Help Me, I Love Honda's Automatic Transmission For Motorcycles.
The first few minutes on a DCT bike are bizarre. You have to recalibrate yourself to the responsiveness of the thing. With any manual-transmission vehicle, there's a fraction-of-a-second delay between when you start engaging the clutch and when the vehicle starts rolling. With a little practice, you learn to anticipate this microscopic delay, so you can smoothly drive around without missing gaps in traffic or getting honked at when the light turns green.
In some dual-clutch cars, this delay is especially pronounced. The latest-generation automotive DCTs are much better, but in the early days, it could feel like an eternity between when you nudged the throttle and when the computer realized you needed the clutch engaged so the car would move.
On the Africa Twin, I had the opposite problem. The bike starts moving the nanosecond you twist the grip. There is no discernible delay; the bike's computer engages the clutch seamlessly with the smallest breath of throttle, without the flurry of revs or acrid-smelling clutch slippage of some less refined DCTs. The first few times I pulled away from a stop, I startled myself, the bike motoring forward just a half a beat sooner than I expected. It takes a minute to get used to rolling away without having to play the clutch-throttle balance game. It's a lot like driving an electric car, where there's no delay for clutches to engage or a torque converter to spool up. After three stop signs, I got comfortable with the Africa Twin's immediacy; from there on, it became a delight, making the bike feel ultra responsive and sharp.
The Africa Twin's six-speed DCT offers four modes: Drive, Sport 1, Sport 2, and Sport 3. Left in Drive, the bike upshifts obsessively, holding the revs well below 3000 in calm surface-road cruising. The big 1084-cc parallel twin has no trouble motivating the bike at those low engine speeds, but it's certainly not the most vivacious way to ride. I found Sport 2 to be the sweet spot, with higher shift points that pretty closely mimicked the way I'd choose gears. The engine sounds great, throaty and muscular, and kept around 4000 rpm it's nice and snappy.
Thus God Help Me, I Love Honda's Automatic Transmission For Motorcycles.
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