Efficiency. Combustion engines have a shockingly narrow acceptable power to fuel consumption zone
Which is where CVTs excel. Maybe I’m old school, but if you have something too powerful for a CVT belt to handle, fuel efficiency is not your top priority. Maybe I sound like an old fart going “nobody needs FIVE gears when three is plenty!” but imo the only vehicles that have any business having 10 or more ratios are the ones that regularly pull a few dozen tons of cargo. We should have stopped at six. More than that and a CVT is what you need.
I have a 26 year old car with a 5 speed manual. I can’t say I’m sure any of these new 10 speed auto cars will still be running in a quarter century with a quarter million miles on the clock.
One little rubber band boi: it’s show time
He’s variable, he’s continuous, and he’s trans. And he’s saving you ✨ monayyyyyyy ✨.
(Extra irony given Clarkson’s dislike of EVs)
I miss my Leaf. Great car, with no fucking active cooling for the battery. In the desert. It pained me. You could have been perfect, you could have been the chosen one!
Japan makes some fantastic things. The fact that it was so painfully obvious that they didn’t bother to test it in any other climate was just suicide.
Yeah, they never intended the chemistry for the extreme southwestern US environment. The production design included an aging process that was supposed to minimize initial degradation but it wasn’t enough without active cooling, even in a pouch design.
Around mid 2014 a chemistry change was made that was intended to alleviate some of the issues, and a fair number of US packs were replaced under warranty.
Through design changes for the 64kWh packs for the newer models, they were insisting active cooling still wasn’t needed, so out they went, still sealed up without any cooling system, but I haven’t looked them up to see how well they’ve been faring since they dumped the production to a Chinese company.
Uh, I may or may not have been involved…
Efficiency, yes. The second part is a little misguided though. The different gears in a transmission allow the vehicle to move at your desired speed while keeping the engine’s speed low, thus reducing fuel consumption.
Power to fuel consumption isn’t really a thing afaik. Naturally, a slower spinning engine will use less fuel.
Sorry for unclear wording, I meant that you obviously need some level of power output to move, but you need different levels of power output to keep moving at any given speed, hence the gears. What I meant by ‘power to fuel consumption’ was that while you theoretically could go at a high speed using a low gear up to a point, that would be very inefficient. I’m not actually an engineer, though I pretend to be one at university.
Good thing I’m not an educator!
