In some of the newest cars in the marketplace, you can shift gears by simply pressing a button, turning a knob or toggling a small joystick. Yet simultaneously, plenty of different automobiles still require motorists to make use of one foot for the clutch pedal and another for the gas, all while using one hand to manipulate the gear-shift lever through a definite design of positions. And several other current vehicles don’t have any traditional gears at all within their transmissions.

But whether or not a vehicle includes a fancy automatic, an old-school manual or a modern-day continuously variable transmitting (CVT), each unit has to do the same job: help transmit the engine’s result to the driving wheels. It’s a complex task that we’ll try to make a bit simpler today, you start with the fundamentals about why a transmission is needed to begin with.
Let’s actually start with the typical internal combustion engine. As the fuel-air blend ignites in the cylinders, the pistons begin upgrading and down, and that movement is used 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 lower gear means optimum efficiency with the wheels moving slower than 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 with a gear selector. A lot of today’s vehicles have five or six forwards gears, but you’ll discover older models with Variable Speed Transmission anywhere from three to six forwards gears offered.

A clutch can be used to transmit torque from a car’s engine to its manual transmission. The various gears in a manual tranny allow the car to travel at different speeds. Bigger gears offer plenty of torque but lower speeds, while smaller sized gears deliver much less torque and invite the car travel more quickly.