In some of the latest cars in the marketplace, you can shift gears by simply pressing a button, turning a knob or toggling a small joystick. Yet at the same time, plenty of different automobiles still require drivers to use one foot for the clutch pedal and another for the gas, all when using one hand to manipulate the gear-shift lever through a distinct design of positions. And many other current vehicles don’t possess any traditional gears at all within their transmissions.
But whether or not a vehicle has a fancy automatic, an old-college manual or a modern-day constantly variable tranny (CVT), each unit has to do the same work: help transmit the engine’s result to the generating wheels. It’s a complicated task that we’ll try to make a bit simpler today, starting with the basics about why a tranny is needed to begin with.
Let’s actually begin with the typical internal combustion engine. As the fuel-air blend ignites in the cylinders, the pistons start upgrading and down, and that motion is utilized to spin the car’s crankshaft. When the driver presses on the gas pedal, there’s more fuel to burn in the cylinders and the whole process moves quicker and faster.
What the transmission does is change the ratio between how fast the engine is spinning and how fast the driving wheels are moving. A lesser gear means optimum functionality with the wheels moving slower than the engine, while with an increased gear, optimum performance includes the wheels moving quicker.
With a manual transmission, gear Variable Speed Drive Motor shifting is handled by the driver via a gear selector. Many of today’s vehicles have five or six ahead gears, but you’ll find older models with anywhere from three to six forwards gears offered.
A clutch is used to transmit torque from a car’s engine to its manual tranny. The many gears in a manual transmission allow the car to visit at different speeds. Bigger gears offer plenty of torque but lower speeds, while smaller gears deliver less torque and allow the car travel more quickly.