Quote:
Originally Posted by Franco Cozzo
Imagine having a vehicle that can't drive backwards up a hill without damaging itself, I'm sure the trade off is so worth it so your 92KW/170NM monster can change gears in .0000000001 of a second, shaving off countless milliseconds from its agile 10 second 0-100 time 
This is what happens when you let engineers make decisions, they should all be kept in a dark room and fed through a hole in the wall with tight control over what they do |
See, its actually the other way around, the marketing department wanting headline figures (be that acceleration, but most likely an economy) to make it easier for them to sell to customers. Then the accounting department gets in on the deal, wanting lower fuel use figures so that (in certain countries) the company doesn't have to pay additional CAFE levies.
It's all of the above that led to the whole Powershift debacle. The engineers knew there was a problem, and how to fix it, but the people in the office didn't want to spend the money, nor did they want to compromise the fuel economy numbers to get that all important CAFE number.