Our Audi’s are both 7 speed wet clutch S Tronic, so the same as DSG I assume. The only Audi 3.0 tdi to my knowledge that got the 8 speed ZF torque converter was the BiTdi, and that’s because of the extra ponies. If the average Joe drove an S Tronic/DSG vehicle I doubt they’d notice any difference on a run. I just did a quick auto trader check and for a gearbox that is considered the devil, there are an awful lot of VAG DSG vehicles that have done well in excess of 150K miles, with some having galactic mileage.
If I’m honest, I’d always steered clear of double clutch gearbox vehicles myself but there wasn’t an alternative in the vehicle that I chose. So today, in the interest of fairness I asked my independent reviewer (my wife) for her opinion. I asked if there was anything she didn’t like about either of our Audi gearboxes and she said no. I then asked which was the better gearbox, the Audi S Tronic or the 8 speed ZF in the bmw, and without hesitation she said the ZF in the bmw, as it’s just smoother at low speeds, hill starts etc. So there you have it, nothing wrong in the functionality of them if serviced properly, but there are better autoboxes out there.