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http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/nst/Wednesday/Features/20060725154006/Article/index_html
Not all transmissions are made equal. SHANNON TEOH and JEREMY MAHADEVAN clutch at... clutches.
MALAYSIANS are a family-loving bunch. Children of all ages are still made to observe Father's and Mother's Day with brunches, hi-teas and whatnot, all at their parents' expense. If that isn't love, what is?
Reciprocally, parents are always protective of their children. They send their children for tuition, they give duit raya and buy cars with the little munchkins in mind.
This is regardless of how little they earn. The family must have a car, if not two, and they must all cater to the possibility of four, if not five, needing to be shuttled somewhere.
So when the Perodua Myvi was launched, it sounded the death knell for cars like their very own Kelisa and Kancil, until then, the standard bearers of economy cars.
At the same time, it ensured that the race to buy a Proton Savvy, was nothing more than a false start. Just after the launch, the waiting list for Myvis stretched up to eight months, whereas one of us actually put in an inquiry for a Savvy, and was told that the wait would only be two weeks long.
Exactly how many mothers were going to put their little tykes in the back of a car whose entire ad campaign was based around being part of a comic? Exactly how many of those mothers were planning to be in an accident in the first place, to test if the car was really 'built tougher than you think'?
For most of them, the Myvi's larger size meant everything. It was more 'practical' even though it could cost up to RM4,000 more than its Savvy equivalent - that is, by leaving out the 'never going up Genting' 1.0l Myvi and matching the 1.3l Myvis with the 1.2l Savvys manual to manual and then automatic to AMT.
And at the end of the day, should a collision ensue, the availability of airbags in the premium spec Myvi would seem far more assuring than 17 squigllion Newtons per millimeter or something of torsional rigidity even if it meant forking out nearly RM50,000.
After all, they were never going to be driving fast enough for the wobbliness of the car to became a safety factor. This however, is where all the good bits of the Savvy lay - exactly where most family-oriented buyers' blindspot is.
But here's the fact of the matter. For a five-door supermini hatchback, the Savvy isn't that tight a fit. It's got a cubbyhole of a boot but you can fold the rear seats of course and get a very decent amount of travel essentials in. It's not as noisy and fidgety as the Kelisa or Kancil and it's got a pretty decent Clarion sound system. So it's nearly perfect as a city runabout and for a two-person road trip too.
It's never going to travel with five like how the Myvi possibly could, but you'll travel with two or three with a good deal of fun for the driver.
You'll never want to drive a Myvi but you may settle for a Savvy with its smart-ish looks and smarter handling. Well, smarter on the manual at least. Sounds odd? Well, it did to us too when we spent a weekend trying to figure out if we'd go for the manual or fish out about two-and-a-half grand more for the AMT.
Automated Manual Transmission is all that abbreviation stands for. And this is what it is - a manual gearbox with a little robot monkey doing all the clutchwork for you. The fact that the throttle is by-wire also allows it to blip the engine for you. That's either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. It does howl gloriously though.
Although it downshifts cleaner than the majority of drivers will ever do, upshifts are a different matter altogether. Most automated manuals require an easing of the throttle during upshifts to keep proceedings smooth, and the AMT is no exception, but while this is something that you could get used to, the lackadaisical manner in which the shifts occur is another matter altogether. You just know that you can shift faster if left to your own devices.
The weight and motion of the gearstick as you manage your way around the ratios is rather pleasing though, unlike, perhaps, the rest of the brittle, plasticky cabin, fancy hand brake aside. But hey, it's an RM40,000 car. The little bits of rubber available were already a surprise.
In auto mode, however, the AMT acquits itself quite well. It isn't entirely silky and it sometimes gets a bit muddled, but it works exactly as touted - it's more responsive than a torque converter, so it's definitely the driver's choice, and the trade-off in comfort isn't unreasonable. It resides in a precarious sort of limbo, though, because people who are used to autos will probably find it a bit annoying, while people who really want to drive are going to lust after the manual.
It's faster, to begin with. Proton's own figures credit it with a 1.8 second lead to 100km/h over the AMT, and in the real world this difference is very palpable. Because you can actually light up the manual's tyres on take-off you get a head start that will even make up for a couple of bungled shifts.
The manual just makes better use of the car's 74bhp and 105Nm of torque, although you're likely to expend more fuel in the process, and the boomy engine note lends no pleasure to hard driving. The clutch pedal travel is also overly long and the take-up point is overly short and strangely high, resulting in tall people having to drive with their left legs in their chins.
They ought to have improved overall pedal positioning to make things like heel-and-toeing easier. Some adjustability to the steering wheel position would have been welcome too. It's all in the little things, and on this front the manual falls short.
Ergonomics aside, handling-wise the two cars are pretty much, well, different. The manual was perkier, with better turn-in and slower build-up of understeer. This is curious, firstly, because the two cars ought to be well nigh identical. So at first we thought that this might be down to an age difference between our two testers, and we were right, in a wrong sort of way.
Turns out the manual was older and had just over 21,000km on the clock, whilst the AMT had only clocked somewhere above 9,000km. Even more puzzlingly, the manual was clearly in need of a good servicing - the alignment in particular needed looking at, since the steering was wriggling like a living thing at high speeds.
So after all our investigations we have to concede that we're not entirely sure what was up with these two cars. A lot can happen to a car in 9,000km, so it's possible the AMT example was simply driven with less mercy than the manual - after all, print ads said that you could chuck the car into M and the car will conquer, and we know that even great conquerors like Alexander and Caesar suffered losses.
We're still entertaining the possibility that the mismatched wheel rims Proton supplied us with might have been responsible, except those appeared on both cars.
So, conclusions? Because of its inherent flaws, the manual might be more amusing initially, however, if you had the RM42,000 (or a grand more for metallic paint), the AMT will be a better long-term prospect. Slower, yes, but less of a pain, especially in traffic and hey, that gearstick is a load of giggly fun.
lol..read the bold and coloured one.
Jul 26 2006, 04:57 PM
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he just didn't push his Civic harder than the Sawi lah...
. Even though i don't really like savvy design but i think it's quite a tough car for it's class. i'm not sure bout the performance though coz i havent even sat in that car nor tested the car b4. Many ppl doesnt really expect much from a savvy due to the price they're paying for n even some reviews from their frens or other ppl. Maybe bcoz of that when the car performs better n it's slightly above their expectations they feel happy n satisfy with their rides. Well as for the review about savvy smoked an civic EK(sorry bro he din meant the 06 civic, he meant the 6th gen) i think the writer did wrote it abit too 'over' or so called 'lebih'. Not that it's impossible to do it but i believe that the civic wasnt really in the rush or in the mood of racing with a savvy? Or maybe the writer should come out with a review about a savvy drifting on the way to genting? Maybe the great nissan fairlady will lose to a savvy? Fast n furious' 4th episode will have savvy drifting in Tokyo? 
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