I drive a 54 plate Octavia 1.9TDI Elegance with DSG auto box and I am baffled as to why the gearbox takes so long to sort itself out when I change from braking to accelerating. It must take over two seconds after I press the accelerator before it decides to accelerate. I know sensors, electronic computing and mechanical clutch movement is involved but why does it take so long in this modern age of fast computing? I’ve heard of other automatic cars that don’t have this problem so is it the mechanical co-ordination of the DSG two clutches that takes the time? Does anyone know of a fix or is it something I have to live with?

Thanks in advance

I've heard this and I think it's to do with which gear it has pre-selected based on your use of the throttle.

When decelerating you've taken your foot off the throttle and as a result it pre-selects the next gear up rather than the next gear down. As a result it has to think about it a little when you prod the throttle again.

Something like that anyway.

That does not sound right !! I would get it into a main dealer and have it checked out, the DSG is renowned for being very smooth.

The changes are smooth - that's not the problem I don't think - the issue is it can be caught out when braking then accelerating again as to the choice of gear and it may take a second to kickdown whereas normally it's instant. I've read it a few times on here and experienced it myself on a test drive although just once as the circumstances only arose one time for it to do it. Wasn't the end of the world but was noticable, especially when normally you couldn't tell what it was doing - for it to go from a tenth of a second to perhaps a whole second delay in its gear change is a noticable thing.

I'm fairly certain it's due to the way it tries to pre-empt which gear you want next based on the way you're driving and sometimes it gets it wrong. The second clutch will have prepped the next gear up rather than the next gear down so when you boot it after braking it goes "oh, you want the other one eh? Hang on then...there you go".

If that sort of thing happens, why not just flick it across to manual and change yourself.

I drop down a steep hill going to work, and when I brake at the bottom the gearbox thinks you want to change down, so now I just use manual and leave it in 5th/6th to get round it.

I'm fairly certain it's due to the way it tries to pre-empt which gear you want next based on the way you're driving and sometimes it gets it wrong. The second clutch will have prepped the next gear up rather than the next gear down so when you boot it after braking it goes "oh, you want the other one eh? Hang on then...there you go".

That's exactly right. The DSG is a form of pre-selector gearbox (which have been around in various guises for a very long time). It chooses the next gear on the basis of current driving circumstances - it cannot always precisely predict which gear to use next, as a human driver can. Sometimes it makes the wrong prediction and there is a delay whilst it sorts itself out.

The other option is to slip it into Sport when you approach this situation as the box changes quicker in Sport.