In some of the most recent cars in the marketplace, you can shift gears simply by pressing a button, turning a knob or toggling a little joystick. Yet at the same time, plenty of different vehicles still require drivers to use one foot for the clutch pedal and another for the gas, all when using one hand to control the gear-shift lever through a definite pattern of positions. And several other current cars don’t have any traditional gears at all within their transmissions.
But whether or not a vehicle has a fancy automatic, an old-school manual or a modern-day continually variable transmission (CVT), each unit must do the same work: help transmit the engine’s output to the generating wheels. It’s a complex task that we’ll make an effort to make a bit simpler today, starting with the fundamentals about why a transmission 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 moving up and down, and that movement is utilized to spin the car’s crankshaft. When the driver presses on the gas pedal, there’s more fuel to burn off in the cylinders and the complete process moves Variable Speed Transmission 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 lower gear means optimum efficiency with the tires moving slower compared to the engine, while with an increased gear, optimum performance comes with the wheels moving quicker.
With a manual transmission, gear shifting is handled by the driver via a gear selector. A lot of today’s cars have got five or six forwards gears, but you’ll find older models with anywhere from three to six forward gears offered.
A clutch can be used to transmit torque from a car’s engine to its manual tranny. The various gears in a manual transmission allow the car to travel at different speeds. Bigger gears offer plenty of torque but lower speeds, while smaller sized gears deliver less torque and allow the car travel more quickly.