Through people asking about putting turbo on a CVT, i did a little reading up on what cars currently have a CVT with turbo. Through this ive come to discover Audi's A4 has a turbo CVT, but their CVT is a Chain mech where ours is a Belt/pulley.

My question is, what is the difference? as far as strengths and weaknesses? do they have the same power potential or can the chain take more of a beating?

The thing is, the chain set up is compaired to that of gears on a bike. I dont know about anyone else but bike chains ALWAYS fall off or slip, i've gotten many many dirty hands trying to put mine back on . So reasonably thinking i dont see how a chain mech could be that much diff from a belt/pulley, but since id like hard facts, i ask for them .

 

A belt simply relies on friction to keep its grip on the pulley system and I imagine would be prone to slipping with too much power. A chain can actually grip teeth (or something like that) on the pulleys, so it can hold with more power. I'd like to see the inside of one of these Audi CVTs to see how they designed adjustable pulleys with teeth, if that's indeed what they did.

 

screw it. I had a huge article written on the Audi multitronic tranny, but this site does it much better and even has pics. Check it out.

http://www.audiworld.com/news/99/mul.../content.shtml

Read through and check the schems. That's why the Audi transmission is able to handle more power than the usual belt-driven CVT transmission.