Can anyone exlplain to me how a semi auto box works? What it does? Interested in general but particularly on a bay.
They never made them for the bay only fully auto. Just the beetle (and early 911 porsches) had semi-auto or stick shift boxes. They use a 3 speed gearbox and have a torque convertor instead of a conventional clutch. The gearlever has a microswitch at the bottom of it so when you put your hand on the lever it disengages the clutch and you change just like a normal manual car, just without needing to use the clutch pedal (because there isn't one). Theres some clever bits in the enginebay that run off the engines vacuum too.
I had manual shift A Class with no clutch pedal. As stated above, it was a manual with a switch in the gear mechanism and an automatic (but otherwise standard) clutch. Thank God it was a company car and I left the company - about 35k miles it started to slip the clutch. I suspected that it was sensor trouble and the system was partially disengaging the clutch, then re-engaging. Build quality on that era Merc was pretty shonky anyway and automated manuals have come a long way in the past 10+ years.
