Are there any cheap, new cars available in the U.S. that are NOT drive-by-wire?

Not so much more information but more control. You can put individual sensors on the throttle pedal and the butterfly on a DBC, but there's not really any point. In DBC, the pedal (torque request) is locked to the butterfly position (measured by TPS) unless something goes wrong. It no longer has to be, so the ECU has a new tool to do what needs to be done to achieve its goal.

This can mean some pretty interesting failsafes, where the car can turn off your butterfly if it thinks there's a problem with a stuck throttle. BTDT. I've also been on track with an actual stuck throttle and a cable, it was not quite as easy to deal with. There was no way for the car to detect it or deal with it, whereas the DBW car figured it out and took action.

Stefan said:

In reply to TJL :

BTW, that’s also not solely a DBW thing.  The vaunted 86/87 GLH-S had boost scheduling based on vehicle speed to save the transaxle.  So you couldn’t get full boost until you were out of 1st gear.

So, um, maybe what you’re complaining about is not really DBW, but really manufacturers protecting their products and customers from themselves, as they should be.  It’s just, perhaps, easier to do with DBW.

You guys are right, I didnt write it correctly but i think you got where i was coming from. DBW makes it easy to limit throttle. And yes, I do know it is to help keep the vehicle from breaking and help keep people from killing themselves too quick. If your going to put crazy power in a normal car, at least build it to handle itsself. I prefer being able to use my own judgment and driving skills. Which of course is a manufacturer/ safety thing, not a direct DBW thing, so im gonna go to bed. 

Hanging revs on upshifts doesn't have anything to do with DBW.  ECUs have been doing that with cable throttle bodies for years, they just use the IAC to accomplish it.

I hated the DBW in my 05 Legacy GT. At least I thought I did, until I swapped out the heavy dual mass flywheel and replaced it with a lightweight one. It turned out that the throttle was not the problem after all. 

I do hate torque management. My Titan has this, and it really saps power at low speeds. It's not a drivetrain preservation feature, because the my 2WD truck does not allow full power until a much higher speed than the 4WD version, which has the same transmission and rear end. For that matter, the Frontier mentioned earlier had the same tranny with a 6 cyl., so I don't see the need to limit those trucks. 

Keith Tanner said:

Cable driven throttles aren't necessarily linear either. Put a cam on the throttle shaft and voila, you have a non-linear throttle plate response. GM was notorious about doing this, making the initial tip-in very aggressive to make the car feel more powerful. If you didn't like it, you could buy a different wheel for the shaft. Exactly the same thing you don't like about DBW.

Stop getting wound up about it. Drive the car and make your choice on how the car works. Doesn't matter how it gets there, what matters is the end result.

I've experienced that first hand - I bought an engine swapped Spitfire (Spit 6) that had a poorly executed marriage of the linkage-based throttle on the engine carbs and the cable throttle on the car.  The leverage ratio was all wrong.  The pedal got progressively harder to push until it reached a certain point where it became really easy. Unfortunately, that tipping point was right where you were often trying to hold the throttle in traffic.  It was annoying as hell until I finally reworked the linkage to make the leverage ratio more linear.

After driving mostly DBW cars since 2003, I don't really notice the difference anymore. Even when I go from those cars to my classic cars with cable controls. I've found most cars have an acclimation period, but I've owned and driven so many different types of cars the throttle feel isn't something I really think about anymore.

The_Jed said:

New as in '17 or '18 model year.

 

Cheap as in under $15,000 base price. Think econobox, Fiesta, Focus, Versa, etc.

 

NOT drive-by-wire as in I'm a Luddite and I like to drive my cars, not engage in a simulated driving experience.

I don't think anything made in the last ten years isn't drive by wire, at any price.

Drive by cable doesn't work with modern engine control strategy.  The throttle position has nothing to do with engine output.  Engine output is controlled with cam timing more than the throttle plate.  In some engines, the throttle is wide open all the time except on cold starts.

Keith Tanner said:

Thanks for the insight, that's how it had been explained to me. I do know that the throttle butterfly and the pedal are uncoupled in the ND Miata, it plays all sorts of fun games that you can see on a vacuum gauge.

A coworker installed the stock GM throttle map on my Miata as part of a tune update. It's very slow on initial tip in, then more aggressive as you get closer to 100%. Probably to make it easier to modulate the power for a clunky driver. I didn't even make it out of the parking lot before telling him "something's wrong, I've lost all my throttle response". Reloaded the completely linear map, the engine felt SO much better.

I have a book about the development of the LS1 engine.  In the book (written by one of the engineers, or project heads, I forget) he says that they explicitly gave the LS1 drive by wire so that they could give the incoming Corvette good drivability for casual drivers (smooth tip-in, better traction control than the old setup in the LT1)  without sacrificing responsiveness for enthusiasts.

This is interesting. I don't​​ hate the throttle in my CR-Z, but I have a persistent problem getting a reasonable blip out of it. Well, I don't hate "normal mode." Sport mode's throttle map is stupid.  So, I'm in third, I want second.  Heel and toe, so I'm giving a braking input, too. About a third of the time (aka, really often) I'll get almost nothing. About five percent of the time, I'll get a huge blip. 

It's easy to blame the driver, but I've been driving the same five minute route the same way, twice a day, every workday in this car for more than three years. I think the car deserves some blame. 

E-gas is a big disappointment in my recently acquired 996 vs similar year BMW 330i (also DBW.)  

All of it has to do with what the computer does when you're shifting.  Porsche apparently didn't think 911 owners would want to rev match downshifts way back in 2002.

It can be done, but you literally have to give it about 80% of the pedal travel to convince it that you really do want to increase the revs.

Without hyperbole, the engine will rev in first gear under full load about as fast as it will free-rev.

There is supposedly a microswitch you can zip-tie to keep the e-gas from remapping when you depress the clutch.  That's on the short list to try.

On topic: DBW is ubiquitous and here to stay, at least until they take away the go pedal.

The programming on some cars will not accept throttle input while there is brake input. There's good reason for this - ask Audi and Toyota - but it can get in the way of some of the fancy footwork enthusiasts enjoy. It's a capability that is available with DBW, but it's not an inherent feature of DBW.

I'd been wondering now and then about the torque request maps, how they're shaped across different engine speeds: If we assume a linear map for a moment, is 50% throttle meant to be 50% of engine's max torque at current engine speed, or does it scale up to attempt to provide 50% of the engine's peak torque even though we're at a different speed? Maybe it's somewhere in between, and this is part of that Brand X flavor alfadriver was talking about...

This is also pertinent to the fact that if the throttle is a torque request, then a blip is a special case because we're after an engine speed increase with no specific torque. Or maybe it can just be mapped to torque greater than zero, since a blip doesn't take a big throttle angle...

In reply to Ransom :

This is exactly why DBW can be so confusing.  The "good" DBW maps will mimic the torque response of a cable throttle.  Bear in mind that the same 10% throttle opening with a cable throttle may be 100% torque at low RPM and negative torque (engine braking) at high RPM.  So the pedal position to torque request is expected by tradition to be highly dependent on engine RPM. 

I note with some level of amusement that it seems that the vast majority of complaints about drive by wire stem from people who insist upon archaic H gate transmissions and all of the hokey pokey pedal motions required for them....    I will allow that the drive by wire calibration on my S60R annoys me because it closes the throttle when upshifting.  What is the point of having a turbo and an automatic if you're just going to close the throttle when shifting?  Hopefully there is a tune out there that will negate that crap.  (Overall the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.  On cold starts, the cam timing gets so advanced that the turbo is spooled up at idle like it has antilag, but the drivability is unaffected.  Being able to play with cam timing like that allowed Volvo to use a huge turbo with a big downpipe and put the catalyst about four feet downstream in the downpipe, rather than bolting it to the turbo outlet)

Interestingly, some of the newer manual trans enthusiast cars will automatically rev match your downshifts for you.  I know Corvettes will, and I remember seeing something about Mustang V8s having it too.  But then, if the computers are controlling the engine AND the trans, you get results like my favorite 'Ring video, of the ZL1 rev matching every automated downshift, which is to say all of them.

I am still kinda shocked that THIS was engineered by the same corporation that engineered the 2.0 turbo Regal, which seems to actively hinder any attempt at enthusiast driving.

Knurled. said:

In reply to Ransom :

I am still kinda shocked that THIS was engineered by the same corporation that engineered the 2.0 turbo Regal, which seems to actively hinder any attempt at enthusiast driving.

It's funny that you say that driving a Volvo.  They actually specifically tune turbos to sell un the EU to be very not fun- they drop boost above 4500 rpm to discourage hard driving.  I saw this on a trip to Volvo talk Turbos among all of Ford back in the mid 2000's.  

alfadriver said:

Knurled. said:

In reply to Ransom :

I am still kinda shocked that THIS was engineered by the same corporation that engineered the 2.0 turbo Regal, which seems to actively hinder any attempt at enthusiast driving.

It's funny that you say that driving a Volvo.  They actually specifically tune turbos to sell un the EU to be very not fun- they drop boost above 4500 rpm to discourage hard driving.  I saw this on a trip to Volvo talk Turbos among all of Ford back in the mid 2000's.  

I still need to boost log teh R, becaus allegedly the first run of 6-speed auto models were still boost limited to 10psi instead of 15, and my car was built in late '05, so one of the earlier 6 speed models.  But I can definitely attest that the power does NOT fall off over 4500.  It just pulls like a freight train past 6500, which is damned high for anything with a 93mm stroke and 143mm rods IMO.

I discovered that if you set the transmission into "Sport" mode, independent of the chassis settings, it will also alter the throttle response.  It's almost difficult to drive smoothly, and the trans REALLY likes hanging onto lower gears.  But it also doesn't let off when upshifting.  I encountered accidental power-on oversteer last night when it banged an upshift in a traffic maneuver, and it was not entirely displeasing.

On my non-HPT Volvo, I had a manual boost controller set to 9psi because it was cheaper than replacing the failed boost solenoid.  More than that got me more knock counts than I felt comfortable with.  I guess that is the difference between 10:1 compression and a tiny turbo, and 8.5:1 compression with a free breathing one

Knurled. said:

Interestingly, some of the newer manual trans enthusiast cars will automatically rev match your downshifts for you. 

My Mini does this, and it caused me some consternation for a little while, because I didn't know it would, and it made my attempts at heel and toeing miserable. It works really well now that I know to let it.

It doesn't do it on 2-1, and the fact that I haven't developed a feel for this car since it mostly rev-matches itself, along with the infrequency of actually doing so on 2-1, and maybe how it blips, result in few smooth attempts so far.

I'm mostly up for rapid automanuals and so forth in new cars, but I think my future has a lot of older cars in it, and I'm earnestly a bit concerned about my heel toe skills atrophying if I keep spending too much time in this car.

Ransom said:

Knurled. said:

Interestingly, some of the newer manual trans enthusiast cars will automatically rev match your downshifts for you. 

My Mini does this, and it caused me some consternation for a little while, because I didn't know it would, and it made my attempts at heel and toeing miserable. It works really well now that I know to let it.

It doesn't do it on 2-1, and the fact that I haven't developed a feel for this car since it mostly rev-matches itself, along with the infrequency of actually doing so on 2-1, and maybe how it blips, result in few smooth attempts so far.

I'm mostly up for rapid automanuals and so forth in new cars, but I think my future has a lot of older cars in it, and I'm earnestly a bit concerned about my heel toe skills atrophying if I keep spending too much time in this car.

The NC and ND 6-speed automatics rev match the downshifts, with engine braking.  It’s pretty a cool feature.

I kinda knew that my CR-Z handled declutching while in cruise control differently. It seemed to almost, sorta hold revs, and cruise is not cancelled. 

This thread had me want to experiment. 

I think I've figured it out. It appears that the car is actually rev matching the next gear up. Run up to 25 in 2nd and set cruise at 3000 rpm. Push in the clutch and the revs drop to about 2700. Shift into third and release - perfect rev match. I tried this at several speeds this evening, and it seems to nail it every time. I don't remember reading this from the manual.

I think one thing that's come across in this thread is that there are a ton of variables and factors to consider as to why certain things happen and how many things can have drivability side effects. 

For me, the bottom line is that there are WAY too many possible upsides to DBW to ever throw the baby out with the bathwater. Unfortunately, this is one of those things that will never meaningfully affect sales and so, in my opinion, all we can do is find the cars we do enjoy and.. enjoy them. 

My much hated DCT on my Fiesta, not me.     It down shifts as you slow/brake.

I have no problem with the DBW.