I've got a 2012 A5 coupe with the multitronic CVT and while I love the car itself, the gearbox has always been the weak link and it's finally starting to show its age with the dreaded hesitation between what passes for gears in this thing. Rather than pouring money into rebuilding a transmission that's fundamentally flawed by design, I've been toying with the idea of doing a manual swap instead, seems like it would solve the reliability problem permanently and make the car way more engaging to drive. I know it's been done before in Europe and the US but I'm struggling to find a workshop in the UAE that's willing to take on a project like that without charging more than the car is worth. The mechanical side doesn't scare me as much as the electronics and coding, getting the ECU to play nice without the TCU and making sure everything from cruise control to the rear lights still functions. I was browsing http://auditransmissionrepair.ae/ reading about the common CVT failure points and it just reinforced my feeling that even a properly rebuilt one is a ticking clock. Has anyone in this region actually gone through with a manual conversion on a B8, and if so where did you source the parts and who did the labor?
