In some of the most recent cars in the marketplace, you can change gears simply by pressing a button, turning a knob or toggling a small joystick. Yet simultaneously, 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 manipulate the gear-shift lever through a distinct design of positions. And many other current vehicles don’t have any traditional gears at all within their transmissions.

But whether or not a vehicle includes 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 driving wheels. It’s a complex task that we’ll try to make a little simpler today, starting with the Variable Speed Transmission basics about why a transmission is needed in the first place.
Let’s actually start with the normal internal combustion engine. As the fuel-air combination ignites in the cylinders, the pistons begin upgrading and down, and that motion 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 spinning and how fast the driving wheels are moving. A lesser gear means optimum functionality with the wheels 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. A lot of today’s vehicles possess five or six ahead gears, but you’ll find 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 transmitting. The many gears in a manual transmitting allow the car to visit at different speeds. Bigger gears offer plenty of torque but lower speeds, while smaller sized gears deliver less torque and invite the car travel quicker.