In a few of the latest cars available, you can change gears simply by pressing a button, turning a knob or toggling a small joystick. Yet simultaneously, plenty of different automobiles still require motorists to use one foot for the clutch pedal and another for the gas, all when using one hand to manipulate the gear-change lever through a distinct pattern 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 consistently variable transmitting (CVT), each unit must do the same job: help transmit the engine’s result to the generating wheels. It’s a complicated task that we’ll make an effort to make a bit simpler today, starting with the fundamentals about why a transmitting is needed in the first place.
Let’s actually start with the normal internal combustion engine. As the fuel-air mixture 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 complete process moves faster and faster.
What the Variable Speed Transmission 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 overall performance with the tires moving slower than the engine, while with a higher gear, optimum performance comes with the wheels moving faster.
With a manual transmission, gear shifting is handled by the driver with a gear selector. A lot of today’s vehicles possess five or six forwards gears, but you’ll discover older models with anywhere from three to six forward gears offered.
A clutch is used to transmit torque from a car’s engine to its manual tranny. The many gears in a manual transmitting allow the car to travel at different speeds. Larger gears offer plenty of torque but lower speeds, while smaller gears deliver less torque and allow the car travel quicker.