Originally Posted by Snake Vargas

I don't see what's with the apathy or dismissiveness about the 7G-Tronic. There is no disadvantage to having more gears, cost and complexity aside. Sure, you don't 'need' the extra gears, but how does better acceleration and potentially better fuel economy strike you?

The lower gears can be geared even lower for better acceleration. The higher (highest?) gear can be geared higher for better economy when cruising at minimal acceleration (ie. just enough to equal friction and air resistance deceleration). The mid-gears can all be more closely spaced to make driving more smooth and to reduce even further any 'gaps' in accelerative ability.

It's also not only for large engines. Somehow car companies have conned us into thinking that more gears belong on cars with more powerful engines. Instead, they are the engines that can make the most of relatively fewer gears. The torque simply makes up for the acceleration shortfalls of widely spaced gearing. In contrast, smaller and less torquey engines should have more gears to keep them at their best operating rev range more of the time. However, they make us think that it's somehow the largest engines that should have the most gears. It seems to me to be a way of differentiating your lower spec models from the higher spec ones arbitrarily instead of in terms of ability. Though you could argue that they are just widening the gap by making the top models perform even better and sparing unnecessary expense on the worst models.

Furthermore, it's not a matter of '7 gears is too much' - in an automatic, you don't need to worry about that. That's the whole point. However, on a conventional H-gate manual, it is possible you could get confused. So in many ways I think 6 forward speeds is possibly the limit there, in terms of general human abilities.

But, since we're talking about the 7G-Tronic, and as an auto, I think it's a deadset necessity.