A855 - 5 Speed

Dave, I'd disagree with you that "torque rateing has little to do with real life". It has everything to do with real life. Ratings are used to determine the suitability of something for a particular use for virtually anything civilization uses. That's where you start. The only time this doesn't work is when the actual service conditions are different than the design service conditions. Then there usually will be trouble.

It was interesting to read your thoughts about rating methodology. 1) use an engineering approach to determine a design for a desired torque rating or 2) go through the steps of 1) and then break it and modify the torque rating accordingly. I can't see a vendor using destructive testing to arrive at an equipment rating. IMHO there are too many variables in a destructive test to get results that are consistent.

I still think that there has to be a rating factor, a correction factor, whatever, something that is applied to the maximum torque value of an engine to get the design torque rating of a transmission. But who knows, I surely don't.