Eli5 what does the transmission on a car do and how does it work?

Question

Eli5 what does the transmission on a car do and how does it work?

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Answer 1

The transmission on a car uses gears to reduce the number of full turns of the engine per minute to a good number of full turns of the wheels per minute. The engine works best going really fast, but the wheels don’t. It turns out that the amount of rotations of the engine works best at pretty much one value, but the wheels need to go at different speeds, so the transmission switches the gears so the wheels go the right speed and the engine stays in the same range all the time.