In some of the latest cars on the market, 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 vehicles still require motorists 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 distinct pattern of positions. And many other current cars don’t have any traditional gears at all within their transmissions.

But regardless of whether a vehicle has a fancy automatic, an old-college manual or a modern-day constantly variable transmitting (CVT), each unit has to do the same job: help transmit the engine’s output to the driving wheels. It’s a complicated task that we’ll make an effort to make a little simpler today, you start with the fundamentals about why a transmitting is needed in the first place.
Let’s actually begin with the typical internal combustion engine. As the fuel-air mixture ignites in the cylinders, the pistons begin upgrading 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 whole process moves faster and faster.

What the transmission does is change the ratio between how fast the engine is Variable Speed Drive Motor spinning and how fast the driving wheels are moving. A lesser gear means optimum overall performance with the tires moving slower compared to the engine, while with a higher gear, optimum performance includes the wheels moving quicker.
With a manual transmission, gear shifting is handled by the driver via a gear selector. Many of today’s cars have five or six forward gears, but you’ll find older models with from three to six forwards gears offered.

A clutch is utilized to transmit torque from a car’s engine to its manual transmitting. The many gears in a manual transmission allow the car to visit at different speeds. Larger gears offer lots of torque but lower speeds, while smaller gears deliver less torque and invite the car travel quicker.