In some of the latest cars available, you can shift gears by simply pressing a button, turning a knob or toggling a little joystick. Yet at the same time, plenty of different automobiles still require drivers to make use of one foot for the clutch pedal and another for the gas, all while using one hand to control the gear-change lever through a definite pattern of positions. And several other current cars don’t possess any traditional gears at all in their transmissions.

But regardless of whether a vehicle has a fancy automatic, an old-school manual or a modern-day constantly variable tranny (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 to begin with.
Let’s actually begin with the typical internal combustion engine. As the fuel-air blend ignites in the cylinders, the Variable Speed Transmission 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 complete process moves faster 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 overall performance with the tires moving slower than the engine, while with a higher gear, optimum performance includes 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 have got five or six forwards gears, but you’ll discover older models with from three to six forwards gears offered.

A clutch is used to transmit torque from a car’s engine to its manual tranny. The various gears in a manual tranny allow the car to visit at different speeds. Larger gears offer lots of torque but lower speeds, while smaller gears deliver much less torque and allow the car travel more quickly.