And how is it different from automatic? Also, do you have to switch beats manually or can you just drive normally like you would an automatic car?
In: Technology
So, you know cones? Circle at the bottom, tapering up to a point?
Well, if you have two cones (well, two sets of two cones, but that’s a physical detail), you can slide a belt up and down them to run the belt over different diameter circles. An continuous range of them, at different diameter ratios.
Normally to change a gear ratio, you have to mesh different size gears together in a gearbox. The above is like having just two gears, the radius of which you can change at will.
CVT requires no (active) shifting, just like an automatic vehicle; however it doesnt use gears like a regular automatic transmision
for the average person; its an automatic transmission…….just with different parts/pieces under the hood
CVT is one of the subcategories of an automatic transmission
By having two cones facing in opposite directions, you can have a belt connecting them and have a wider range of “gears” compared to traditional designs while having smoother driving experience, higher gear slides one way, while lower gear slides the other way
The downside is that they tend to be more delicate and less reliable than the others, such as with overheating, slipping, or loss of acceleration. They can also make driving less engaging to some people since they don’t have the distinct up and downshifts that a traditional transmission would have
A normal automatic has specific gears, like a manual transmission. However, the transmission will shift automatically for you when necessary. When this happens, you can feel the change in gear.
In a CVT, there are no specific gears, so you’ll never feel that specific change. You drive it the same as you would a normal automatic.
It’s easier to visualize a bike’s gears than a car’s transmission, so I’m going to compare the two so that you might have an easier time understanding the concept. (There are actually bikes with continuously variable gear systems, but they’re rare, and work differently than the hypothetical I’m going talk about.)
So the purpose of a transmission or gearing system for either a car or a bike is to take the rotation of the engine or pedaling and convert it to a different speed of rotation for the wheels. Car engines and human feet work best when turning at certain speeds, and that’s rarely the same speed you want your wheels to be turning.
Bike gears do this with toothed gears and a chain, and most cars do it with gears turning other gears. The exact details differ a lot, but generally speaking the effect is the same. When we talk about switching gears on a bike or a car, the system is literally changing which gears are used to transfer power from the engine/pedals to the wheels.
If you look at the stack of gears in a bike’s transmission, you’ll see that it almost forms a cone. What CVT basically does is replace those distinct gears with a cone so that you don’t have to shift from one gear to the next, you can just slide a little bit up or down the cone as you need to. That’s the “continuous” part of CVT. Instead of having distinct gears with interruptions between them, there is a unbroken/continuous shift between different gear ratios. (Of course, if you just replaced gears and a chain with a smooth cone and a belt, the belt would just slip off, and there’s a lot of engineering that went into making a system that actually works, but the general principle is the same.)
You can drive a CVT just like an automatic. The system will change the gearing to suit the needs of the car. The exact feel of acceleration will be a little different, but no change on the part of the driver is needed.
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