Modern Electric Cars are devoid of any gears. Currently, most electric vehicles are equipped with a single-speed automatic transmission, save for the Porsche Taycan and the Audi e-tron GT, both of which get a two-speed automatic transmission. At present, there are no EVs with manual transmission on sale globally. However, soon things might change as Toyota has filed a patent for manual transmission for EVs.
Toyota has filed a patent for a clutch-operated manual transmission for electric vehicles in the United States of America. This technology is aimed at mimicking the operation of a traditional manual gearbox of an internal combustion engine car in an EV. According to this Japanese carmaker’s patent filing, there will be a special controller that will alter the torque of the electric motor. Moreover, there will be a real clutch pedal and a physical gear-shifter for changing gears.
However, the company has used the word ‘pseudo’ in its filing which indicates that this new-age technology might be developed for a more engaging drive and not for the car’s operations. “The controller of the electric vehicle is configured to control the torque of the electric motor using the MT vehicle model based on the operation amount of accelerator pedal, the operation amount of the pseudo-clutch pedal and the shift position of the pseudo-shifter used by the operation of the reaction force actuator.”
“The controller is configured to store shift reaction force characteristics simulating the characteristic of the shift reaction force according to the operation of the shifter. Then, the controller is configured to control the shift reaction force output by the shift reaction force generator according to the operation of the pseudo-shifter using the stored shift reaction force characteristic,” Toyota said in its patent filing report. We should get to know the actual working procedure of this new technology in due course of time.