What happens when you change gears with a manual car? Like what happens that allows the car run better and go faster?
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Unless you’re skidding, the speed the tires turn is directly related to how fast the car is going. So if you’re going, say, 50 kph then an average car tire is going a few hundred RPM. But gasoline/diesel engines the size that we use in cars don’t run well at a few hundred RPM…most of them can’t even idle that slow. They like to be something like 1000-5000 RPM. So we need to put different sized gears between the tires and the engine to match the speed of the engine to the speed of the wheels. That puts a ratio between how many times the engine turns for each turn of the wheels…for example, 3:1 (the wheels turn one revolution for every three engine revolutions). Changing gears in a manual car (and in an automatic) changes the gear ratio around so the ratio between wheel speed and engine speed changes. This keeps the engine within it’s happy operating speed range but gives you a much wider range of possible wheel speeds. Without changing gears, we’d overspeed the engine once we got up to about 30 kph or so.
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