Re: are CVTs only for weaker engines? (dj_wawa)
Just for the sake of completeness ...
First CVT ever was on a 1960s Dutch car called the Daf, a company that was later incorporated into Volvo and is now, I suppose, part of the Ford Premier Group. Daf gearshifts just had two positions - Forward and Reverse - though I think some of them had low-ratio holds to take full advantage of their 40bhp or whatever it was. I somehow doubt this car ever made it to the US market ....
Daf CVTs ran on rubber bands so there would have been no question of putting high torque through them. Nowadays the bands have been replaced by metal V-section belts which can cope with much greater torque.
Being banned by F1 usually means CVTs are a good idea! There was an F3 car fitted with a CVT in the early 1970s but I don't think it ever raced, though it was certainly tested. Bob Judd's novel "Formula One" includes an automatic transmission car which seems like a CVT - it was written when people were thinking about using CVTs, so a couple of years before the ban came into force. The ban isn't specific - the actual ruling is that you can't have more than seven distinct ratios, whereas a CVT has thousands and thousands of them. Production CVT cars with sequential shift options simply isolate six or seven of those ratios. As one UK journalist wrote, "what's the point of building a continuously variable transmission and then prevent it from continuously varying?"
