No,
simplified: The point of a gear box is to keep the engine rotating at a speed where it is happy at the speed it is going.
when the engine start to spin too fast as you accelerate you change up a gear(+), when the engine start to spin too slow when you decelerate you change down a gear(-)
an automatic does the same thing, just automatically
You start the car with 1st and then 2nd gear. Anything more will damage your engine.
You drive in pedestrian areas in 2nd – 3rd gear (maximum).
On the highway you use 5th gear. But you gotta build up to it for a few seconds, as you accelerate, don’t just go straight to 5.
In sharp turns, as you decelerate, you go one gear lower, two sometimes.
Uphill is also another place where you use lower gears (switch from 5 to 4, in some cases even to 3 or 2) because those rotations help your engine to overcome the obstacle.
Do you know anything about manual transmissions?
The simplest way I can describe it, is your engine and your wheels turn at different speeds from each other depending on the gear. Your engine makes more power at *high* RPM, but it burns less fuel at *low* RPM.
Paddle shifters just electronically change the gear your car is in, instead of using a gear stick and clutch like a manual transmission.
Low gears let the engine spin at high RPM, but the wheels turn slower. (so you get more power to get the care moving from a stop).
Higher gears make the engine spin at lower RPM, but the wheels turn faster with each gear (so the car can cruise at higher and higher speed, but the engine can stay at low RPM to safe fuel)
Edit: Here’s a good (https://youtu.be/txQs3x-UN34) demonstrating gears with Lego.
For ANY car, low gears give your car more torque (easier to start pushing your car forward), while higher gears give your car more power (easier to *keep* your car moving at a given speed).
In a manual car, you must correctly shift gears up and down based on what you need.
In an automatic car, it does this for you… Automatically.
In those same automatic cars, there’s typically an electronically handled manual option. You pick the gear, the car handles shifting without dealing with the fun of a clutch on your manual car.
Some automatic cars (and even manual cars) have the gear shifters on the wheel to make it quicker to shift.
There is no functional difference between a paddle shifter and traditional stick shift. It’s just convenience, speed, and to an extent safety (no need to take a hand off the wheel).
Gasoline engines work by turning something around in a circle quickly. This circular motion of the engine is transferred to the wheels to make the car go. Gasoline engines work best when they’re turning at a certain rate. If they turn too slow, the engine stalls out and dies. If they turn too fast, the engine becomes less efficient and can overheat. The speed that an engine is running is measured in revolutions per minute (rpm).
A typical engine works best around 500-5000 rpm, roughly. If you just hooked up the wheels directly to the engine and revved it up to 5000 rpm, you wouldn’t go very fast, maybe 15mph max. In order to get around this limitation of gasoline engines, we use gears. Gears allow the wheels to turn at a different rate than the engine. In other words, you can insert a gear so that the wheels turn around 5 times every time the engine turns around once. This means that the engine can still remain in the 500-5000 rpm range while the wheels can be taking the car down the road at 70mph.
A transmission is the part of the car that switches gears. Older cars had manual transmissions, which the driver has to constantly manage which gear is being used and manually switch from one to another. These cars have a third pedal called a clutch, and a gear stick to change gears. Later, automatic transmissions were developed to manage the gears automatically so that the driver doesn’t need to worry about it. However, an automatic transmission makes some assumptions about how you want to drive. It generally tries to manage the gears so that you’re driving efficiently and minimizing fuel usage. A manual transmission gives you more control because you get to choose when to shift gears. There might be a situation where you keep the car in a lower gear because you want to accelerate more quickly and you don’t care that it takes more fuel to do that.
So, there are now cars that have automatic transmissions but still allow the driver to manually choose when to shift gears. One popular way that these cars are designed uses paddle shifters, where two paddles behind the steering wheel allow the driver to shift gears without taking their hands off the wheel. This is mostly used for racing and other high performance driving, and is rarely used just for normal trips to the grocery store or commuting.
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