how do four cylinder engines have a six gear shifter
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4 cylinder engines have less power. That makes more important to have the right gear ratio. More gears improves the ease with which you can pick gears, leading to smoother #kifting.
Cylinders are the the number of combustion chambers to power the revolutions of the engine. It’s the transmission that determines the number of gear combinations to transfer those revolutions to the drive shaft. You could have a four-speed transmission on a 12 cylinder engine, or any other combination.
The number of cylinders does not have anything to do with the number of gears.
The number of cylinders is how many different explosion chambers there are in the engine. More chambers means you get more booms per revolution which means more power.
Gears are about translating the number of engine rotations to tire rotations. Because your engine is a bunch of moving parts, it has a minimum number of rotations it needs to do to prevent stalling out, and a maximum number it can do before it’s moving to fast to work properly. However, that range in engine RPMs doesn’t cover the whole range in speeds you want to travel, so we use gears to change the ratio between the number of engine rotations and number of tire rotations. Changing gears simply changes the ratio between engine rotations and tire rotations.
Those are completely unrelated.
Cylinders are located in the engine. They are where gasoline explodes to create power. Gears are located in the transmission, which sends power from the engine to the wheels. The different gear ratios are optimized for different efficiency levels at different vehicle speeds, so you pick the best gear for your current driving conditions.
Almost all modern manual transmission passenger cars (regardless of whether they have 4 cylinders, 6 cylinders, 8 cylinders, or some other amount) have 6-speed transmissions. It’s the most you can really put in a transmission without starting to make it confusing for the driver to shift.
Semi trucks, and many modern automatic transmissions, have more gear ratios then 6. Ford and GM collaborated to build a 10-speed transmission, a few years back.
Motorcycles can even have 5 or 6 speed transmissions attached to 1 or 2 cylinder engines. Engine and transmission styles be completely mixed and matched.
The last truck I drove had a four cylinder and a ten speed manual transmission. My friends dad had a Camaro with a V8 and a 2 speed automatic.
Engines like to stay the same speed, right where the torque and horsepower peaks cross over. That’s generally where the engine is most efficient. If it didn’t take forever to spin up, we could have happy little engines spinning huge flywheels at high speeds. Instead, the practical solution is a CVT. That’s basically a transmission that has infinite “gears” based on engine load and vehicle speed.
Most cars are happy with a five speed. You generally find a six speed in performance orientated cars, with some moving on to a seven speed for their manual transmission passenger vehicles. I personally think six is too much and end up skipping gears.
More and more, you’re finding automatics in performance cars and they’re faster than their manual version with ten or more forward gears (we don’t ever count reverse, unless you have a multi split axle and have more than one reverse).
Adding to the other answers, think of a bicycle, if you have one or had one as a kid and know how it works. Does it matter how many legs you have to determine how many gears the bicycle can have? Not really. Likewise, engine and gearbox are two separate things and, while there is a range of combinations that make sense (a manual with 20 gears would be hugely impractical on a passenger car) and the gear ratios need to be a good fir for the engine, there’s nothing stopping a four cylinder engine from having more gears than a 12 cylinder engine.
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