Is Selespeed like Sensonic?

AIUI, yes. Do some lurking on alt.autos.alfa-romeo

Accompanied by the sound of a chisel on slate snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com, managed to produce the following words of wisdom

Selespeed is the worst of all the paddle shift setups. It's monumentally unreliable and not very good when it works. 10k miles between box rebuilds isn't unheard of.

Sensonic is a manual gearbox with an automatic clutch, you do the gearchanging by moving a lever between the front seats in the time honoured fashion, but you've only got two pedals.

It doesn't neccessarily "break", it's just s**te when working properly, from my experience as a passenger in a car with it. My brother had a 147 with it and did about 60-65k in it from new, and it never failed as such, but it just felt like a badly driven manual.

I wouldn't touch a Selespeed car with SteveH's.

Is that enough ?

Apart from the engine and gearbox a 156 seems like a good buy. Imagine that, an Alfa you avoid because of the engine.

Just that I saw a Selespeed at the local car place that had that LPT 9-5

What I figured.

At least with sensonic, there are companies that will fit you a third pedal and replace the magic slave cylinder with a normal one.

It's a tip-tronic / sequential / DSG style shifter - ie. push / pull.

Heh.

Truth is, so long as the engine is serviced, kept in oil and has the belts changed on time, it'll be fine.

But still avoid like the plague?

Are they bad as a smart car?

There's a technique to driving them - most people seem to think you can just floor it, keep it floored, and hit the buttons to change up - it doesn't work like that - you need to lift as you hit the change button to get it nice and smooth. Downshifts will take care of themselves, so long as you come off the throttle. (It does a little blip to match revs).

When they're working, they're awesome, when they're broken, they're very expensive indeed to fix.

Avoid like the plague.

Less reliable!