When a potential customer asked if any of our used convertibles had a manual transmission, I honestly replied that none did … but they could be shifted manually without a clutch pedal. If you are not familiar with this, it’s more than the old transmissions with D, 2, and L settings. While you could pop the old automatics into each of those gears, Volvo’s Geartronic does a little more.
Five-speed Geartronic Automatic Transmission offers the best of both worlds. Leave it in five-speed automatic mode for carefree driving, or nudge it into manual mode to shift gears yourself. This allows you to maintain a lower gear, for example, to provide added engine braking as you approach a bend or curve. The automatic transmission is also perfect if you need to get the car to crawl slowly with a heavy load under difficult conditions.
You can actually leave the car in a gear for an extended period of time and then nudge the gear selector up or down to shift to the next gear. It really is like having a manual transmission without the clutch pedal.