Originally Posted by tractorman How many of us really use DCCD?
Not many I'd say.
Id say everyone with a newage would just leave it in auto but I used mine in the type r a few times when the weather was bad as you know, the type r can be tail happy in the wet with the diff set to the rear.
For normal daily trundling around I leave it on auto alright... however I personally hate the auto setting if pushing the car on.
The auto-dccd setting then changes things so much that it unsettles the car and makes the handling unpredictable (a very unnerving feeling as a driver when you have the car perfectly setup going into a corner and then half way through the auto-dccd changes stuff up. The car suddenly shifts weight and grip around and comes unstuck in a way the driver didn't intend and which is very hard to recover from as when you adjust power / brake / steering to "fix" the auto-dccd induced problem, the auto-dccd yet again starts to intervene and change things - it sucks).
When I go for a proper drive I change it to manual override and depending on road conditions I set it to fully open when dry (green on dash wheel to back), or set it to open minus 2-3 little clicks on the wheel button (till first light change on the dash from open) if wet. So, from that point of view -- yes, I do use the dccd, simply because I feel I have to stop the auto-dccd scaring the hell out of me lol.
The ability to fully lock the diff when say climbing a snow covered mountain road is handy though, but... very important to reduce lock to open when trying to steer on very slippy iced / snowy roads as on full lock you will lose a lot of grip when trying to go around corners.
There is some additional grip / flexibility there with the dccd fitted cars, but it requires experience and tweaking it manually to get the best out of it. Without experience and manual intervention it makes the car worse imo.
I suppose what I am trying to say is -
not having the dccd is better in my view than the auto setting of dccd when doing anything other than driving it easy in traffic as a daily (and in that case the non-dccd car would be as good as the dccd fitted one anyway).
The only caveat would be when you go to sell the car again as most buyers out there believe they "must have" the dccd - and hence maybe an STI without dccd would be harder sold (or for less €€€).