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So whats everyone think of them?

I've only driven rentals with CVT, no subies tho. It is not performance oriented at all IMO. I am impressed with the claimed mileage that Subaru is getting - highest MPG AWD vehicle ever.

They sounded good on paper, but I hate all of the ones I've driven. I highly prefer a traditional automatic and I hate automatics.

My take on them is this. I was at a Subaru dealer the other day and saw the parts guy wheeling a nice plastic crate, asked what was in it. He said a CVT transmission a $7000. rebuilt one, wow I wonder what a new one is then?
Anyway seen lots of stuff online about how long they don't last, maybe 100,000 miles if your real lucky, with most crapping out at 30,000 to 60,000 miles.
First of all a normal automatic trans, has clutches that are designed to lock up and not slip after locked, and the CVT trans is designed to constantly be in slippage, either a belt or wheels constantly being either pinched and slid up and down a pulley or in the case of the toroid type wheels sliding up and down the sides, as well as slipping if a good load is placed on it since there is no positive engagement like a gear set, or solidly clamped friction material like a clutch. No matter what they try its a bad design for pulling a trailer or pulling HP at the rear wheels. I don't understand why any car maker that cares about staying in business and keeping customers would even consider that transmission. Well maybe they are a bit cheaper to make and guaranteed sales of new or rebuilt units and happy dealer shops that get to replace them. But then owners seem to complain when they have to spend thousands on a car thats only a few years old.

There are lots of cars with CVT transmissions lasting well into their lifetimes. Look at first gen Prius and second gen Prius transmissions. Plenty privately owned ones are well over 200k with no tranny work at all. They even use them as taxi cabs in lots of places and put 500k+ on them with no issues. Why would a taxi company use a car if it broke that often and was so expensive to fix? They wouldn't.

CVT used to be poorly executed and unreliable. Look at Subaru's own CVT tragedy. The Justy. How many of those have you seen with a CVT? I've seen two. One on the road, driving and one in a junkyard, with a bad transmission. There's not many of those left running and driving. Only time will tell on some manufacturers CVTs, but so far Subaru's and Nissan's modern implementation seems to be very reliable, even in higher power situations.

Myself, I wouldn't drive one, but I don't think they are necessarily all bad. They are great for fuel economy and great for the A-B beige box commuter who doesn't care about driving feel or enjoyment. But I'm a little odd, I've never owned even an automatic transmission car and I never plan to.

The problem is with high torque applications. Nissan rushed the CVT to market attached to a V6 a year after I was reading about the engineering challenges of making them work with anything over 1 liter. Consequently, dealers could line up Muranos with shot transmissions around the block. I imagine (though, we are talking about Nissan) that by this point they've gotten them to last OK.

I don't like them. They may work fine in lower hp cars and for folks that don't drive them hard, or give a shit about driving a gutless piece of crap without any driver feel or enjoyment.

Nissan has the CVT pretty much figured out from a driveability perspective. Some of the cheaper cars leave something to be desired, especially the Versa, but the Maxima drives nicely with a CVT.

Subaru's CVTs, even their current ones, are terrible, unfortunately.


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Hopefully Nissan has improved their CVT from when I drove a rogue a couple years back 08-09 time frame. I wasn't too impressed.

My sister has a 2011 Rogue (in black, aren't they all?) and nope. My brother-in-law's Civic Hybrid is the worst though. That's just a horrible, gutless drivetrain top to bottom and only averages maybe 5 mpg more than my 5-speed Focus rated at 36 highway.

The good news is though, that I read Chevy was making more manual transmission Cruzes than they anticipated due to increased demand and Ford is offering the manual in the Titanium trim (highest level) on the Focus, where it was only offered in the second lowest (SE) trim when I bought mine. I complained in their feedback that I would've bought a higher level trim (SEL, though, which is skipped for the manual just because I wanted 1-touch up windows) if they offered in in a manual. I also heard some dealers are offering to teach people to drive manuals. As a personal observation, which means nothing, I've also seen more newish cars rolling back a little on hills lately, leading me to think the manual transmission is making a small enough come back to at least hang on.