R Throttle Travel

[vidman2]

Just picked up my new R, love it but concerned about the throttle travel compared to my MK7 GTI. On my GTI throttle response starts as soon as I press the pedal but on the R there is a good Inch of travel before anything happens in both Normal and Sport modes.

Is this normal? It feels very wrong at present,

[Booth11]

Just picked up my new R, love it but concerned about the throttle travel compared to my MK7 GTI. On my GTI throttle response starts as soon as I press the pedal but on the R there is a good Inch of travel before anything happens in both Normal and Sport modes.

Is this normal? It feels very wrong at present,

Mines the same.  Feels noticeable at first but you soon get used to it and adapt your foot action accordingly.  If you really can't get on with it then consider a pedal box.  Exonian can tell you all about them. 

[fredgroves]

Is that in normal mode? Have you tried seeing if sport mode (is it called race in the R?) is different?

The mode differences are largely a fly by wire throttle remap...

[wigit]

i really notice this on the wife's when manoeuvring , with the remap on mine they also sorted out the throttle response, all be it mine is now linear which is not everyones cups of tea

[p3asa]

I could be wrong but I'm sure I've seen in VCDS settings about pedal travel so I wonder if it can be altered electronically?

[monkeyhanger]

Mine seems fine, but perhaps being permanently  in Race mode makes a difference?

When maintaining a speed of less than 40mph and just giving it a little or backing off a little with the traffic flow, I find the first inch of travel very useful with plenty of control. Maybe it''s a DSG thing? The DSG box does generally prefer to knock it down a gear for all but the tiniest of acceleration rates.

[Booth11]

Mine seems fine, but perhaps being permanently  in Race mode makes a difference?

When maintaining a speed of less than 40mph and just giving it a little or backing off a little with the traffic flow, I find the first inch of travel very useful with plenty of control. Maybe it''s a DSG thing? The DSG box does generally prefer to knock it down a gear for all but the tiniest of acceleration rates.

Could be a DSG specific issue.

But even with DSG I find the pedal travel issue more apparent in with the gearbox in Drive. Feels pretty numb for the first inch and then the response starts to kicks in but you've still got to put in some effort.  You get used to applying greater foot pressure as necessary, but that first inch is still a dead inch.
 
With the box in Sport I find the delay greatly reduced and the pedal more responsive from the off, reacting quicker to lighter foot pressure. Much prefer that and might explain why I’m driving the R in S or S-manual most of the time, more so than I ever did the Mk6 GTI where the pedal response was immediate.  Might also explain the cars thirst and my decreasing mpg. 

Observations of throttle travel in my DSG are:

In D - numb/ lack of response for first inch.  Effort required.
In D/manual (using stick or paddles) - slight improvement in early throttle response, but still some initial delay.
In S - response almost immediate, less pressure required, less pedal travel.
In S/manual (stick/paddles) - response immediate - quickest and most reactive of all, no pedal travel.

[vidman2]

Has anyone fitted a DTUK Pedal Box to their R and if so does it completely solve this issue.

Just taken my GTI out and it does not suffer this issue, the throttle is nice and linear and I can not understand why VW would make the R so different.

Is there a VW Tech on the forum who can advise if there is an easy fix - is the pedal mount/actions adjustable

[fredgroves]

I seem to remember asking if a throttle pedal remap was possible without a pedalbox and the answer I got was a no.

I suspect that means "we haven't figured it out yet" because if a software selection through the infotainment screen can select a different throttle input map, then definitely something *could* be done to achieve the same - unless of course there is another component that drives the throttle mapping and the car's main computer only is able to send mode select functions down to it.

Even then, that discreet component should be re-programmable... its just whether or not anyone has bothered to try and hack it.

Clearly the external "mess with the inputs" box is easier, cheaper to build and probably more reliable in the long term if VW change their component supplier or its software version etc

[Exonian]

Thanks for the introduction Ms B.

I won't reply to each of the posts above as I'm on my phone and can't be arsed to scroll constantly. Plus I'll just end up falling out with autocorrect and end up needing therapy/alcohol.

Right, hands up who is old enough to remember cable throttles?
You had a cable attached to your accelerator pedal (just like the cable on the brakes and gears on your old Raleigh ten speed crud iron bike you used to ride to school on) that attached to the butterflies in your carburettor. When you pressed the pedal the butterfly would open a bit more and some more fuel/air mixture could be sucked into your engine. The result was instantaneous more or less.
Ok it works a bit different on Diesels as they run at 100% throttle all the time as far as incoming air is concerned, so the difference on older Diesels was the cable was attached to the fuel pump and you'd squirt more fuel in which gave you more power and even a bit of smoothness briefly until you ran out of revs. 

Fast forward past these old fossils to the mk5 Golf and its floor mounted accelerator pedal just like we used to have in Beetles.
By the time I'd found enough copper coins down the back of the sofa to buy a mk5 I was playing about with modifying Diesels so got an early 140TDI and remapped it hoping it would be the great white hope that the press releases made it out to be with its new 16v cylinder head and extra capacity. Alas not.
So off I went to test drive a mk5 GTI having seen Clarkson claiming that "it just has torque everywhere!" on the Top Gear track on TV.
Err, no it didn't. It had torque when you drove it flat out but it didn't have much torque in half and half driving - or at least it felt that way thanks to the unresponsive pedal.
At this time I discovered Sprint Boosters and have since progressed to DTUK Pedal Boxes.

To cut a long and boring story short, not long after Mr Wigit had one of the first REVO maps for his Scirocco I got an early REVO map for my mk6 GTI. I asked them if they could get the throttle response a bit better with low pedal openings and they said it was a responsive as they could get it. And yes, once past the first inch of travel the car was lightening quick. In fact a little too frenetic for FWD.

The difference between throttle mapping on the ECU and the actual throttle pedal modifications is the fact that inide the throttle pedal of the modern car is a little circuit board that sits at the wrong end of the ECU for the ECU to be able to do anything about it. REVO et al can modify the throttle map any which way they like, so a nice linear map like Mr Wigits is great for progressive acceleration when you have masses of torque you wish to control. However it doesn't cure the dead pedal which has been tuned at the factory to not do anything for an inch. What the pedal box does is offers you different programs to get rid of that dead travel by amplifying the signal from the little circuit board in the pedal itself BEFORE it hits the ECU thus eliminating the dead travel making it feel like you have a carburettor.
The pedal box gives you options as to how much assistance it gives, and as the R has a more aggressive factory throttle map in the ECU than a GTI I find it best to run the Pedal Box on a softer setting that just gives extra response with minimal foot movement without employing full throttle at only half the pedal travel which would be the case if you crank the pedal box up to full amplification. It has quite a lot of settings and is a lot better than the factory Normal/Race settings.

It all depends on your driving style and local road conditions. I have country lanes, bends, hills and speed limits to consider, so low rev and low throttle opening response is VERY important to me. If you sit on motorways and just chuck it down a few gears for a minute or two whilst doing Marty Feldman impressions with your eyes; with one on the road ahead and one on the mirror in case that 3 series a few cars back turns out to have lots of blue lights hidden in its grille then maybe you'd not benefit from one so much.