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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To start with, gears are basically spiny levers. When you’re change sizes, you’re changing levers. Imagine you have a see saw, with the pivot in the middle. If you put a 10 pound weight on either end, it’ll be balanced and not move. Now move the pivot so it’s not in the middle. One side will be longer than the other, this is your large gear. Now if you put a 10 pound weight on the short end, you can balance it with a 5 pound weight. Of course, there’s no free lunch. If you try to move the 5 pound weight, you’ll notice that it moves a lot less than the other weight. As you shift the pivot around, the length of the levers changes and you can vary the amount of weight needed to hold that 10 pound weight steady. We already looked at a case where you need a lighter weight, but you can set it up where you need a heavier one as well( that would allow you to move it more instead of less).
So why do we need these levers in cars? Well, your engine is only capable of supplying so much torque or spinning so fast (and to make it even harder these are linked). Gears allow you to trade between speed and torque. If your car is having trouble supplying enough torque, you can trade speed for torque. If you’re having trouble spinning fast enough, you can make it spin faster by giving up torque.
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