In some of the most recent cars out there, you can shift gears simply by pressing a button, turning a knob or toggling a small joystick. Yet simultaneously, plenty of different automobiles still require drivers to use one foot for the clutch pedal and another for the gas, all when using one hand to manipulate the gear-change lever through a distinct pattern of positions. And many other current vehicles don’t possess any traditional gears at all within their transmissions.

But regardless of whether a Variable Speed Transmission vehicle has a fancy automatic, an old-college manual or a modern-day continuously variable transmitting (CVT), each unit has to 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, starting with the basics about why a transmission is needed in the first place.
Let’s actually begin with the normal internal combustion engine. As the fuel-air mix ignites in the cylinders, the pistons start upgrading and down, and that motion can be 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 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 efficiency with the wheels moving slower than 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 with a gear selector. A lot of today’s cars possess five or six forward gears, but you’ll find 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 transmission. 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 allow the car travel more quickly.