NEW Ford/GM 10-Speed Automatic Transmission
 

Say good-bye to our 4, 5, and 6-speed MPG advantage. Welcome the 10-speed automatics!

10 Things to Know About the New Ford/GM 10-Speed Automatic Transmission

Congratulations to Ford and GM for reinventing something nobody needs and wasting time, effort and money on a pointless invention that will soon be phased out in the electric car revolution...

hahahaha SO true, Paul.

One of these days, someone will mate a manual transmission to an electric car motor.

Do you think that would improve the 0-60 acceleration or MPG?

A bit of research on this question came up with this discussion on the Tesla forum:

https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forum...ission-offered

Electric motors don't need gears/gearboxes, they are mechanicaly very simple.

I could see 10 gears if it were for a vehicle with only a 300-400 rpm usable speed range but for a passenger vehicle it seems like 6 is plenty.

Even 10 gears is too few for manual shift loving people like Paul and me. We want 100 gears!

I like one with as many ratios as the molecules in the drive fluid. Electric motors have efficiency peaks.

DIY electric car conversions were mostly a DC motor bolted onto a manual transmission.

The ability to keep either motor in a peak efficiency spot is why the AWD Teslas are more efficient than the RWD ones.

As for the OP, ICEs are still going to be around for the foreseeable future. Since hybrids haven't come through yet for actual trucks, any improvement somewhere helps.

Continuous variable transmissions are neat to understand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLNDGUISTYM

I too am excited about electric! The biggest hurdle is storing energy. Sure Tesla is building a gigafactory to make batteries (which is awesome) but I think the future is super capacitors, possibly made from Graphene.

I think step transmissions, a traditional automatic, have an advantage in giving more overdrive ratios for cruising along.

Capacitors are great at charging and discharging at fast rates repeatedly. They tend to self discharge rather quickly compared to a battery though. A battery is still going to be needed in a plug in.