I get that low gears > more power but low speed. I get that high gears >low power but high speed.
But can someone give me the brain dead intuition of why you need to change gear “sizes”? A single sentence if possible.
I’ve tried Googling it but they always use a bike example. I’ve never ridden a bike. Or they start talking about ratios and it just goes over my head.
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A combustion engine performs better or worse in certain ways at certain RPMs, ***but also***, it can only perform ***at all*** within a certain range of RPMs. If you were to try to drive 10 MPH in 5th gear, the engine would stall because it can’t keep itself running at the super low RPMs that that would require. And if you were to try to drive 100 MPH in 1st gear, the engine would blow itself up because it can’t hold itself together running at such ridiculously high RPMs as *that* would require.
So, the transmission exists to keep the engine spinning within a relatively narrow range of RPMs while allowing a wide range of possible speeds for the vehicle.
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