C8 Dual-Clutch is getting new programming

November 15, 2019 Off By Mike Vietro

During the major magazine reviews, the only major complaint reviewers had was that the new eight-speed Tremec Dual-Clutch automatic was a bit clumsy and not as responsive as it could be. In road and track’s Performance Car of the Year testing, they wrote that “the gearbox was the weakest component in the pre-production C8 Stingray we had on hand” and “part of why the Corvette didn’t win.”

Most of the complaints were not in automatic mode, but rather in the paddle shift mode, where too often testers found themselves running into the rev limiter, or having downshifts denied after a paddle pull.

The good news for us consumers is that, the C8 they had to test was not a finished product. There’s been development work since reviewers got the car, and that work will continue for the foreseeable future to get it just right.

According to Glen Hoeflinn, controls program manager for the DCT, the humpy-bumpy shifts reviewers got here and there all got refined out. “It’s in final refinement, and then it’s in final checks and looking what we’re doing and making sure that it’s behaving exactly [how] we want.”

Refining and programming is not as simple as it may sound, as the new C8 is not a track only car with just one mode. The transmission has different automatic shift strategies for the various drive modes, which adapt in real time. The more aggressive, the more spirited you drive, the more aggressive the transmission is going to respond, but as you start to relax, the car’s going to start to relax.

Just In

Motor Trend reported horsepower numbers

As we reported a few weeks back, Motor Trend published some horsepower numbers for the C8 that we said seemed to be a bit off. Well they have come out and said they messed up. They said “key parameters were botched, but the C8’s still plenty powerful”. It gets very technical as to what happened, with things like “road-load” settings, but the real big problem was that the Dyno was set to all-wheel mode! These factors make the dyno believe the Corvette’s powertrain was overcoming way more inertia than it really was, which led to the inflated results.

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