Why do we have to switch gears to go faster? Why weren’t cars originally made to automatically do that?
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A car’s engine only works at a very limited range of speeds. So limited that your car (with only one gear) would be stuck between (for example) five and twenty miles per hour.
By having different gears, one gear could be 5-20, the next 10-40, then 25-100. Suddenly our car can go a much wider range of speeds.
If we want our engine to be *efficient*, the window gets even smaller. Instead of 5-20, it’s maybe 5-10. More gears also lets us get more efficiency by keeping the engine speed where it will be the most efficient.
A manual gear shift is super simple. Really no more than a few fixed gears and a few sliding gears. Automatic the transition requires some sort of computer to control it, which was really the only thing fundamentally preventing us from making automatic transmissions from the getgo. Of course price would be an issue and it wasn’t really deemed worth all of the extra complexity.
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