Although practicality is still the most important condition affecting the decision to buy a car, there is always a group of consumers who attach great importance to the pleasure of driving. And there are many factors that make up the joy of driving, including power, control, human-computer interaction... Wait, so for a long time, hand-row cars have mostly been regarded as a more "fun" option. Only after entering the electric era, the hand-row gearbox is bound to disappear... Do you? Toyota seems to have a different plan.
Toyota has filed a patent application with the USPTO of the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a manual transmission that applies clutch operation control to electric vehicles. In other words, in addition to continuous improvement in performance, endurance, and energy efficiency, Toyota also understands that "driving fun" is not only to make the car drive fast, but also to be fun for me.
In today's electric vehicle market, the gearbox is basically non-existent. Although there are still a few products that use a transmission mechanism, such as Tesla has a single-speed transmission, but does not have the function of shifting gears, Audi and Porsche are equipped with 2-speed transmissions to improve high-speed power reaction and track performance. In addition to this, the gearbox has almost no room for existence on the new generation of electric vehicles.
Toyota intends to change this situation, and it can be seen from the patent description that Toyota intends to develop a traditional hand-operated transmission, which not only has the familiar gear lever, but also has a clutch mechanism. In the words of the original factory, it is "manual models that adjust the vehicle torque output through the control end by operating the acceleration pedal depth, the pseudo-clutch pedal depth and the pseudo-gear shift position."
The word "pseudo" was indeed used in the original patent application, which means that Toyota did not really intend to install a 5-speed or 6-speed manual transmission on the car, which is not only unnecessary, but will increase the burden on the vehicle. Therefore, what Toyota wants to provide to the driver is to adjust the torque output to simulate the feeling of "operating manually" when the engine of the internal combustion engine is shifted, so that the electric vehicle can also have the control pleasure that originally belonged only to the internal combustion engine.