The Voith gearboxes are most likely 4 speed, but 4th gear only
kicks in at 70km/h and above. The speed limiter kicks in at
60-65km/h so most likely that is why the buses seem to have only
3-speed gearboxes.
I agree to your point. Just like some of the Scanias, they never
seem to attain the sixth gear. It may just be the settings...
If we could see the speciafications that comes with our Habit
Bendies, we would then be sure about it...
To Oceane, is it true that the Voith Bendies can hit third gear
in 4 seconds? I have not tried recording before but they seem to
take slightly longer than this, but for a ZF with 1st gear lockup,
the time would be slower than a Voith Bendy in terms of hitting
maximum speed. That is if the Voith Bendy is not at maximum engine
performance, also called 'flooring accelerator'. With the a Voith
version and ZF version at max performance together, its hard to say
who would win; it all depends on which BC give up first...
However, the monitoring the accelerator movement have another
catch; in the shipment of TIBS Habits, the accelerators of both the
ZF and Voith versions have something which is till now only known
as 'kickdown swtich' in my dictionary. I believe that the name is
not really so, but the swtich works like this...
If you depress the accelerator normally, the engine would run at
normal capacity, but if the BC depress all the way in, there would
be a 'tak' sound, and the engine would go into kickdown, notably,
engine sound increases and the gear goes down by one step. This is
different from normal kickdown; take service 77A to experience a
normal kickdown.
I have noticed that in fact, Habits with Voith gearboxes are the
only ones which can manually kickdown to the 1st gear, while ZF
bendies only reach the 2nd gear in the same action. For service 77A
as example, climbing the same grade with 100 percent passenger
load, the ZF bendy would only remain at 2nd gear 1500-1100rpm,
while the Voith version can hit 2nd gear 1500rpm steady. By the end
of the grade, the ZF bendy would have almost finished its momentum
and just nice, the grade ends, while the Voith bendy can shift to
the third gear and complete the next turn at 50km/h plus. The ZF
would turn only at about 40km/h.
Generally, many would like to associate ZF Bendies with speed,
and Voith Bendies with initial pickup.
