Does the 2015 Honda Civic EX have a CVT?

My friend was telling me that his Civic does not have a CVT. It is an automatic. He was saying "a CVT are those transmissions where you can put the gear box to the left and use manual mode +/-."

Is that how you determine what a CVT is?

A CVT or Constant Velocity Transmission does not shift gears, so it wouldn't need a manual mode or a +/-.

Your friend does not have a clue.

No. A CVT is stepless and does not have manual mode +/-.

Your friend is dead wrong. The 2015 Honda Civic EX does indeed have a CVT transmission. A CVT does not shift gears it just changes ratios by means of a belt and pulleys and does away with gears entirely. Instead of two gears, there's two pulleys connected by a belt. The engine turns one pulley, and the other one is connected to the rest of transmission to the wheels. The magic of CVT is that the size of the pulleys can change from small to large, and infinite sizes in between. So to start off with, the engine's pulley will be small and the other one large, just like first gear. But as the car gathers speed, the engine's pulley is smoothly reduced in size, exactly as the other pulley increases in size. In effect, you're changing gear all the time. There's a few different ways of achieving variation in pulley sizes, but the fundamental principle is always the same.