I have been reading reports from the US recently that suggest that manufacturers have been going too far in making things easy for the driver, when it comes to using an automatic gearbox! The whole concept was to make it easier, so to take it a step further is quite a feat. In the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has received hundreds of … [Read more...]
Overdrive
The concept of “overdrive” has been around for decades and in theory is the ability of the car to use a gear ratio that allows the engine to be running at a lower rpm to that of the road speed which in turn means fuel savings when cruising at motorway speeds, for example, and therefore lower engine wear and noise. Mechanically, the overdrive unit is a secondary gearbox that … [Read more...]
Automatic Transmissions
Did you know that the original version of the modern type of automatic transmission is nearly 100 years old? This is true, however it took about 20 years to reach the automobile! The first automatic transmission that we would recognise today was developed in the early 1920s by Alfred Horner Munro, a Canadian engineer, who developed his to use compressed air to act as the … [Read more...]
Torque Converters
Torque Converters are a way to transfer power from an internal combustion engine to the driving wheels without using a mechanical clutch. Many automatic transmissions use them and most are fluid couplings. To confuse the topic further, vehicles have used fluid couplings to connect an engine to a transmission before the torque converter was invented! Fluid couplings as their … [Read more...]