For the love of CVT!

A continuously variable transmission. Nothing is more polarizing in the automotive industry than this, right now. Some love them and some hate them. I happen to love them. But what exactly is a CVT?

You know when you start accelerating from a stop? Image in. Hear the sound, feel the motion. Got it?

You feel that jerk and hear that noise? That's the revolutions per minute in your car increasing, meaning that it is working harder. To help your car deal with this workload, your vehicle shifts (by itself in an automatic). This puts you into a higher gear, giving you more power and lowering your revolutions per minute. For my non auto enthusiasts, think of a revolution as a unit of work that your engine produces.

But it's noisy and can provide you with quite a jolt. Many cars come with 6, 7 or even 8 speed transmissions. That's 8 different gears, 8 different jolts.

What a CVT does is take those 8 possible gears and replaces them with an infinite number of gears. Yes, you heard it here, an INFINITE number. That means no jolt, an easier load on your engine and higher efficiency. Your car shifts smoothly and calculates thousands of times per second to find the perfect gear ratio.

Why do some people hate it? Some people say a CVT makes your revolutions per minute skyrocket during quick acceleration, like when merging onto the highway. This is loud and a lack of gearshifts takes the 'real' road feel out of the vehicle.

But manufacturers help fight against this by equipping CVT vehicles with a manual mode. This means that a driver can 'shift' their vehicle by pushing a paddle shifter down or lightly pushing the gear shift lever lightly forward or back. This shifts the vehicle up or down and since these vehicles aren't manual transmissions, there's no need for a clutch. That means that if you're going from a dead stop to fast, you can 'manually' shift to get power, and then shift back into regular mode while you're driving and you probably won't even feel it.

I swear by CVTs and am grateful for a vehicle which provides a 'manual' shift mode to get extra power when I need it. That's why I love my Rogue. Still confused on how a more complex engine can improve fuel economy? Compare my MPGs to a Ford Escape, which has the same size engine but only gets 21 MPG.

I am an employee of Nissan North America. The opinions expressed are my own.