I've heard that some CVT's can run the belt in
compression. That's a pretty neat trick. But per
this article, the Subaru CVT does indeed look like a Reeves drive. The belt is steel, so perhaps it
can transmit power on the compression side?
I test-drove some Subaru's when I was new-car shopping back in 2015. I knew they had CVT's, and was surprised to find that they rev & shift pretty much like a conventional automatic transmission. So I asked the salesman about that. He told me that the initial versions of the transmission did keep the torque and RPM optimized as you would expect, with no discrete ratio shifting. But customers didn't like that, as it felt and sounded odd to them. So Subaru wound up programming the transmission controller to emulate a conventional transmission, so that it felt "normal" to people.
