Why do you need to switch between Reverse and Drive when driving? Why not add another pedal that makes the car go backwards instead?
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Too much room for error with that option. Wouldn’t want to be flying down the highway and accidentally hit the reverse pedal.
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I think it’s because that simply wouldn’t work. The gearbox delivers the engine power to the wheels and if the gears are in the forward position you need to change it to the reverse position or else you would just move forward if you applied power.
This is just overly complicated, and I bet it would result in more accidents from people mistakenly hitting reverse instead of forward.
What happens if you hit forward and back pedals at the same time? Engine explodes?
That would be incredibly risky if someone could accidentally press a pedal to reverse the car. On a lot of manual cars you have to lift a lever or press a button on the gear stick to put it into reverse as a safety feature.
You would effectively need two gearboxes and associated mechanisms, doubling the amount of moving parts that can go wrong!
Because there’s already a very simple system for implementing reverse versus drive under the hood.
The gear settings on a car already change some number of engine rotations into some number of tire rotations. Gears are in place so we can adjust the ratio between engine rotations and tire rotations through different settings to keep the engine rotations within a certain range where it won’t stall or break.
One thing with gears is that every gear in a sequence changes the order of rotation. If you had a series of (2d) gears and turned the first one clockwise, the second would go counterclockwise, the 3rd would go clockwise again, the 4th counterclockwise, and so on. We can take advantage of this since we’re already using gears in the car.
If we add one extra physical gear into the sequence for reverse, the end result is that the tires turn the other way when we go into reverse.
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Other than the gear issues it’s for safety.
Now as for the gears:
A car moving forward in gear cannot shift to reverse without causing mechanical issues (breaking very expensive parts). Most cars have an override that prevents the transmission from shifting to reverse unless the car has come to a stop (or very slow). This prevents damage to the gears and tires.
Now from a safety standpoint, let’s pretend that you replace the gears with a belt drive or an electric motor. Now you could have a reverse pedal, but there’s the risk of someone hitting reverse instead of the brake. So instead of stopping they’d end up going backwards.
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