we had a honda fit rental a bit ago while the main car was in the shop. not so much manual but it had a manual mode with race car paddle shift to change gears. it was interesting.
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I really appreciated the twist and go of the 400cc sooter when I dealt with the stop and go on the Seattle evening commute.
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It took considerably longer than 1960 for automatic transmissions to outperform stick shifts in price, weight, reliability, fuel economy, and performance. So many compromises had to be made. Firm shifts (which generated less life-draining heat and provided longer life and higher performance) were uncomfortably jarring. Smooth shifts made the system run hotter and caused less horsepower to reach the drive wheels, which also wasted fuel. You could decide for yourself which part of the spectrum you wanted your stick-shift car to live in, based entirely on how you chose to drive it. I like having that kind of control. Your computer metaphor is something Iâd employ for the manual ignition timing advance/retard lever on Model Ts. Now thereâs something I donât want moment-to-moment control over.
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My 1970 Mercury Cougar has both sequential turn signals and power windows. Iâm lucky that my original sequential signal boxes still work, but I do have OEM spares just in case. I donât terribly mind working on the power windows, though theyâre fiddly and greasy. I liked the fact that when I had to replace the driverâs side motorized regulator, its replacement was half the size and weight, a whole lot smoother, and still fit perfectly into every bolt hole. (It was a revised design for early 90s Mustangs, I believe.) A rare example of Ford doing backward compatibility exactly right.
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One of my Toyotas has this. I believe they are useful when towing, but otherwise I tried it twice and decided the computer did a better job than I did.
That isnât a solution. The problem with the Otto and Diesel cycle engines is that they only work reliably over a fairly narrow range of rpm, typically around 1000-6000, with a minimum of 1500 for maximum throttle and a maximum of 4000 for reliability.
Unfortunately to cover starting up to a maximum speed and deal with hills, you really need a range of speeds at least three and preferably four times this, and a mechanism to allow the vehicle to start (it canât instantly go to 1500 rpm).
In the early days of cars many nontechnical people did not understand this and demanded to know why cars could travel at such dangerous speeds as 30mph. The explanation that to be able to climb a steep hill at all meant a top speed on the level of around 30 was beyond their comprehension.
I submit that the reason was lack of development and an unwillingness to risk increasing first cost. You only have to look at the sophistication of even a 1940s aircraft engine to realise that cars were bottom drawer thrown-together machinery with very little development effort, because the manufacturers could get away with it.
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But tachometers had been invented over a century before that, and isnât their main purpose to show when itâs time to change gears? If the car already knows when it needs to change gears, why not just do it?
And even if it did require human intervention of some sort, why couldnât the stick alone do what it needed to do? The clutch always seemed to me like itâs only real purpose was to distract and confuse the driver, grind the gears, and occasionally stall the car. Doesnât seem a very good feature. (Note: I know very little about cars.)
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Really for seven months of the year my ideal vehicle would be a Piaggio 3 wheeler with the 500cc engine to discourage drivers overtaking on the dual track A roads. But I would want one of those automated pothole filling machines in front of me. (One of my wifeâs relative was the first person to bring one of these into the country.)
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Well that strikes me as an unfair view of history, akin to âwe put a man on the moon in 1969 but still hadnât moved past vacuum tubes and transistors in civilian electronics yet⌠what gives?â Aircraft engines got a bit of wartime development, did they not, based upon wartime priorities. Why werenât automotive transmissions given similar developmental priority? Jeeps have always had manual transmissions available, and not just for nostalgia fetishists. Reliability was the wartime priority, which probably led to a certain if-it-ainât-broke-donât-fix-it conservatism, but also how much call for automatic transmissions was there outside of the luxury market? Every driver knew how to drive a stick, it was just part of the job, a skill one had to learn, and whatever pain-in-the-ass factor was alleviated by the firsthand knowledge that it sure beat walking, or driving a horsedrawn wagon.
Sure, the auto industry wasnât prone to press its R&D costs far past the point of short-term profitability, and as long as most of its customers were content to use existing transmission technology there wasnât a strong motive to do more than minor iterative improvements from year to year, but itâs not like this approach hobbled the automakers, or the worldâs hunger for cars. People kept buying stick shift cars for decades because they worked.
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for a good long while, automatic transmissions had three or four speeds-- and manual transmissions were more fuel efficient. Now, an automatic transmission can be designed to use 8, 9, or ten speeds, or a continuously variable mechanism, and so itâs much easier for car manufacturers to have their engines run in the maximally efficient band.
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Yes, but I was saying that if you combined gearing down with an elaborate mechanism to change the sizes of the wheels while driving, it would be a worse solution than a manual transmission.
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The operating conditions of propeller-driven aviation are very different as well. One takes off at highest power, then settles back to about 75% power and usually stays there. Thereâs the difference: a carâs âflight envelopeâ regularly requires low-RPM, high-torque capabilities; an airplaneâs propeller is useless at low RPM. The airplaneâs âtransmissionâ, such as it is, is just a spur or planetary gear to bring the propellerâs angular velocity down to a reasonable speed (and there are planes out there with directly connected props).
Thatâs not to say that there isnât sometimes a certain conservatism in general aviation. The Germans used some diesel aviation engines in the last war, but theyâre only starting to make a comeback now. Consider that diesels are reasonably mature technology, that they are quite efficient when used in a narrow power band, that they are very happy burning JetA (which is cheaper and a lot greener than avgas - no lead), and then ask, âWhat kept them?â
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Weight and marketing, I would think. The internal forces are higher with the high compression, so diesels became heavy as the compensation was to just use more cast iron for larger engines well on the wrong side of the volumetric efficiency/weight curve. On the near side, little engines remained gasoline while turbines carved out the rest of the market.
Combining contemporary light alloys into diesels helps. Maybe we could also combine multivalve poppet heads with a single giant sleeve valve to push the volumetric efficiency curve farther into larger displacements.
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Two-stroke diesel is common when used in aviation. That simplifies things immensely: not even sleeve valves - one can use ports.
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Speaking of two-stroke diesels and the good old days of tech, no doubt some of our British confrères remember the Deltic engine and the trains named after them. 
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It certainly helped the Russians in WW2: the T34 used a development of a BMW aluminium-based Diesel aero engine design.
My point, such as it was, was not that there was crossover between aircraft engine and car engine design (I know there really isnât1) but in response to the comment about the state of transmissions in cars by 1960. I was suggesting that the example of broadly parallel engineering industries suggested that the car industry suffered from a severe lack of R&D because things were perceived as being âgood enoughâ. The reluctance to bring in seat belts is perhaps another example.
People had experimented with different types of automatic clutch, preselector gearboxes, and automatics, but the investment they got was never very great while the public would accept the manual gearbox.
It may be that a really successful auto gearbox needed the coming of the ECU, but the fact remains that the torque converter was invented around 1900.
1 I discovered the other day that a Dutch firm makes a sidevalve engine for light aircraft, and itâs absolutely state-of-the-art. Increased reliability, small frontal area, simplified maintenance. Pity about the emissions.
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Tank transmissions of the time had it wired.
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I knew a rich kid in college whose dad bought him a stick shift Camaro. He would put it in second gear and just leave it there. I guess it had the power to accelerate, but it must have played havoc with the engine and gear train.
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You could just about do that with an Electraglide in top if you didnât mind the clutch slip.
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Did his parents drive it up from the Bahamas?
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I once drove a car that generated somewhere between 400-450ft/lb at 1700 rpm. It was a gas motor with two turbos. You could easily stick it in 3rd gear, and drive around pretty comfortably. In 6th gear at 30mph, it would still accelerate more than adequately. Gears in that car were effectively arbitrarily.
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