In some of the latest cars available, you can change 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 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 definite design of positions. And several other current cars don’t have any traditional gears at all in their transmissions.

But whether or not a vehicle includes a fancy automatic, an old-college manual or a modern-day continually variable tranny (CVT), each unit must do the same work: help transmit the engine’s result to the traveling 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 tranny is needed to begin with.
Let’s actually start with the normal internal combustion engine. As the fuel-air mix 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 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 Variable Speed Transmission optimum efficiency with the wheels 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 cars have got five or six forward gears, but you’ll discover older models with anywhere from three to six ahead gears offered.

A clutch is used to transmit torque from a car’s engine to its manual tranny. 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 sized gears deliver much less torque and invite the car travel quicker.