Eli5: How does changing gears in cars enable them to travel faster compared to using the lower gears at the rpm?

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Me monkey brain tried to do a google search on my own… me monkey brain didn’t understood a thing…me monkey brain need help

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Imagine you have a wheel next to you about as tall as you. It is like a giant bicycle wheel with lots of spokes. You are going to spin the wheel yourself with your own arm.

You would probably get it spinning by grabbing near the outer edge and pushing downwards right?

So that works, now try spinning it as fast as you can – you are going to eventually hit an upper limit as you keep pulling/pushing down as fast as you can near the outer edge

What if you want to go faster? Instead of applying force near the outer edge, you could go closer to the center of the wheel and spin it from there.

Hopefully if you can visualize this you can intuitively understand how the spokes near the center of the wheel are traveling slower than the outer edge of the wheel. Your arms can only go so fast but you could spin it faster by working near the center of the wheel.

You are like the engine in this case – utilizing mechanical leverage to spin a wheel faster than you could physically move your arm. That’s what gears are for.

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