How come we can’t just add X amount of gears to a transmission and have one of the most efficient cars ever?

Question

How come we can’t just add X amount of gears to a transmission and have one of the most efficient cars ever?

In: 95

Answer 1

You can, and modern cars have a lot of gears, but that adds cost and complexity and can be annoying to drive because it’s constantly shifting gears. There’s continuously-variable transmissions too, which use belts and funky pulley wheels to smoothly change between ratios, but people broadly gave up on those for cars (they had reliability issues putting down that much power), though they are popular in scooters and small motorcycles.