In some of the newest cars available, you can change gears simply by 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 while using one hand to control the gear-shift lever through a distinct design of positions. And many other current cars don’t have any traditional gears at all in their transmissions.

But whether or not a vehicle has a fancy automatic, an old-school manual or a modern-day constantly variable transmitting (CVT), each unit must do the same work: help transmit the engine’s output to the traveling 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 transmission 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 moving up 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 off 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 performance with the tires moving slower than the engine, while with an increased gear, optimum performance includes the wheels moving faster.
With a manual transmission, gear shifting is handled by the driver via a gear selector. Many of today’s cars possess five or six forward gears, but you’ll discover older models with anywhere from three to six ahead gears Variable Speed Transmission 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 plenty of torque but lower speeds, while smaller gears deliver less torque and allow the car travel more quickly.