370Z Synchro-Rev

If, like me, you’ve spent years honing your heel-toe technique on mountain passes and tight roads, you’ll know the pain that I do of getting into a manual car with someone who is having a real hard go and ignoring heel-toe on downshifts.

It just feels wrong and regardless of how much you might trust this person’s driving, it brings out the irresistible urge to tell them to take the passenger seat instead.

Nissan may have come to the rescue on this one, with a system called Synchro-Rev, which is standard equipment in manual 370Zs.

In basic terms, it’s a manual transmission that automatically blips the throttle up to the right revs when you change down a cog.

Before I drove the 370Z, I had read about the system and was sceptical. I was sure I wouldn’t like it because of the aforementioned years of technique honing.

Nissan had obviously thought ahead on this one, because the system also has an off-switch. I truly believed I would drive the car with Synchro-rev on once for the sake of the car review and then switch if off.

I was wrong. Synchro-rev not only works as advertised, it does it more accurately than I can. It also works on up-shifts, which isn’t something that Nissan mentions, but believe me it does.

So, this being a tech article and all, how does it work?

Any modern-day car is full of sensors. There are ABS sensors, lateral-motion sensors, speedometer sensors, cruise control sensors etc etc, which all pretty much amount to programs in either the ECU or a secondary computer fitted to the car.

In the 370Z, there is a micro-switch fitted to the clutch pedal (the same one used for disengagement of the cruise control). When the clutch is depressed, the Synchro-rev system starts.

What the Synchro-rev system does is determines what the road speed is at any given moment(via the sensor that the cruise-control and speedo rely on), and which gear is being selected (via the sensor for the gear position indicator).

The ECU then works out how many revs will be needed to maintain the current road speed in the given gear when the clutch is released.

It then momentarily blips the throttle to those exact revs as you release the clutch.
It’s a brilliant system and can make anyone look like a genius driver to their mates. For those of us that heel-toe daily anyway, it can be switched off if we truly need to feel the tactility of “properly” changing cogs for ourselves. But this is now for the joy of it alone. The Synchro-rev system is more accurate in a purely performance-of-task sense.

Michael Adams from Test Driven Australia
Article originally written for Infinite-Garage