How ironic is it that famed sports car manufacturer, Porsche, have taken to copying Japanese technology from Nissan these days? We say ironic because for the whole first decade of the 21st century, Nissan set its sights on Porsche and its esteemed, precision engineering. The Nissan GT-R was built purely to out handle, out accelerate and out brake a Porsche 911 Turbo. No ifs, ands or buts.
Now Porsche have returned the favour by nicking, (okay, that might be unfair), developing their own version of rev match technology that first made an appearance on the Nissan 370Z manual gearbox. It is a superb piece of kit, made even more superb by its simplicity. What happens is that when initiating a down-shift, the gearbox alerts the engine to give a small burst of throttle to match the engine speed to the transmission speed. This type of speed matching helps eliminate unruly and time wasting hesitations as the synchros re-mesh after a gear change.
Sure, that means there is no more need for heel and toe down shifts (where your right foot on the brake pedal still taps the throttle lightly to increase the engine speed, just before releasing the clutch) but the rev match system makes you feel like a driving God every time you shift gear, because every shift is bang-on. When we experienced it in the Nissan 370Z, we even said at the time that surely every manual gearbox will have this sort of technology in it very soon.
That was two years ago and Porsche are the first to employ this autonomous rev matching to its vehicles since. Porsche will be offering it on the Sports Chrono package for the new Carrera 4 and 4S models. Reports also suggest we’ll see the system in the new Boxster and Cayman as well. Bring it on.
