A manual transmission is from what I understand just a set of gears on these two lil lines that connect and disconnect from eachother with the clutch, whereas an automatic transmission has a whole different thing with planetary and sun gears and stuff. My question is, why? Can’t the ECU just take a normal manual transmission gear mechanism and shift it as if a person were doing it; why do automatic cars utilize this whole new gear system?
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Nowadays it’s mostly because of space in an automatic transmission u can put up to 10 gears approx (Ford mustang, F-150 among others) which can be put in a “small space” due to not needing the big rods of the manual transmission to move from one gear to another.
Automatic transmissions are more efficient in one configuration while a manual configuration is more efficient in another. If you tried to turn a manual into an automatic, you would get a sucky automatic.
>Can’t the ECU just take a normal manual transmission gear mechanism and shift it as if a person were doing it
Yes, it can. This type of automated manual is somewhat common in subcompacts, and it used to be relatively common in high performance cars. It’s a more efficient setup than a traditional automatic, but its major drawback is that it’s not very comfortable to drive. Gear changes are either abrupt and jerky or slow, with a long pause where the car isn’t accelerating.
Traditional automatics with planetary gears have the advantage that they can sort of be in two gears at the same time. You can slur the gear changes and make them quite hard to detect, especially since there’s no interruption to the acceleration.
Today, sure. Back in the ’20’s when the automatic transmission was invented and ’40’s when they became more widely adopted no they couldn’t have. Back then gear changes were controlled by the vacuum of the engine.
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