I don't know when it began, Toyota has become a messenger to defend the joy of driving, they "instigated" BMW to continue to develop a new generation of Z4, incidentally resurrected Supra so that the "JDM spirit" has been continued. They also used their experience on the WRC field to create gr Yaris's exaggerated little steel cannon.
Although the wave of electrification is irreversible, Toyota has said: I want to bring a righteous manual gear to every you who love driving in the era of electric vehicles!
Yes, Toyota recently applied for a patent for a manual transmission specially developed for electric vehicles.
Seeing this, you may be just as confused as I am. Before studying what the manual transmission of Toyota's electric vehicle is, we may as well solve a question.
Electric vehicles need transmissions?
For fuel vehicles, the gearbox is an important part of the power system, the engine is good, if there is no competent gearbox next to it, the experience of the power system will not be good, and even a reliable gearbox can cover up the shortcomings of the engine.
But for electric vehicles, the gearbox seems to be dispensable, because in the vast majority of electric vehicles on the market, there is no gearbox. But does this mean that electric vehicles do not need a gearbox?
In fact, you can't be killed with a stick like this.
For example, some FE Formula E cars have transmissions.
The so-called racing car is the guide of civilian car technology, since the gearbox can appear on the car, it must have its meaning.
You may have heard through various channels that the rear acceleration capacity of electric vehicles is significantly weaker than that of oil vehicles with the same front acceleration capacity, because the torque density of the motor to the high rotation range will be significantly reduced.
As a racing car, although the speed of Formula E is not as extremely fast as Formula 1, it is also a species that often needs to use 200km/h, and they also need to have excellent torque performance in the low and medium speed corners of the street track, so they need a multi-gear transmission to take into account low-speed torque and high-speed horsepower, which is actually the same as the oil car, but the oil car's engine is more constrained by the speed.
▲ Turn the bottom of the meter and shout out its name!
In the field of civil vehicles, another important job of the gearbox is to adjust the working state of the engine to reduce energy consumption. We often hear that many manufacturers will take thermal efficiency as the highlight of the engine's publicity, indeed, thermal efficiency and fuel consumption are inextricably linked, but there is a misunderstanding here, we have also said in past articles, here again pointed out:
The "thermal efficiency" advertised by manufacturers is actually "maximum thermal efficiency", such as an engine with a thermal efficiency of up to 40%, which sounds like a very high value, but it does not provide 40% thermal efficiency in all operating conditions, and the fact is the opposite, it is not 40% in most operating conditions.
In the figure below, this is a universal characteristic curve of the Honda L15B7 engine, which is an engine with good fuel consumption performance in practical applications.
The ring curves in the figure are thermal efficiency contour lines, and students who can understand the contour map should not be difficult to understand, such as outputting 150 Nm of torque at 3000rpm, at this time you can obtain 37% thermal efficiency, which is at the peak of the thermal efficiency of this engine. At this point, the engine output is about 60kW, but it is clear that we are driving at a uniform speed under the legal speed limit, we do not need such a large amount of torque and power, and you usually do not hoist the speed at 3000 rpm at a uniform speed.
Therefore, the oil truck needs a gearbox to adjust the various working conditions that the engine needs to face during our driving process to ensure that the engine is in a better efficiency state as much as possible. Nowadays, some high-efficiency hybrid systems can also save fuel without the use of external power supplies precisely because they can avoid the engine from operating inefficiently on a larger scale.
What about electric cars?
I also asked a friend of a friend to get a map of the universal characteristics of the electric motor, obviously, in the value of each contour line in the figure, it has a completely different style of painting from the picture of the engine just now, which is easy to start at 70%, and can be killed to 90% at will. The overall efficiency is much higher than that of the engine.
Speaking of this, perhaps everyone will have a question, from the chart, the motor is not the lower the speed, the more efficient it is, why do we always say that the lower the speed of the electric vehicle, the more power-saving? Is high speed the dead pit for electric vehicles?
This is because the air resistance of the vehicle will increase sharply as the speed increases during the driving process, and the vehicle needs to output more torque to combat the wind resistance. For a tanker, a larger torque request will generally move the engine efficiency in a higher direction, which is completely enough to offset the disadvantage of more wind resistance.
However, for trams, the maximum speed of the motor is directly linked to the maximum speed of the vehicle without a gearbox.
Assuming that the maximum speed of the motor shown in the figure above is 15000rpm and the maximum speed is 150km/h, then when the speed is higher than 100km/h, that is, when the motor speed exceeds 10000rpm, its efficiency has been properly declining, and at this time, more torque must be provided to counter the air resistance, so the electric vehicle is facing a double disadvantage in high-speed working conditions.
But electric vehicles can actually adjust the engine conditions by adding gearboxes, but this is still a problem that needs to weigh the pros and cons.
▲ Porsche Taycan rear axle two-speed transmission
First of all, under the charging conditions at this stage, the vast majority of the use scenarios of electric vehicles are urban commuting, and there are fewer high-speed working conditions. Secondly, even if there is a high-speed demand for some users, the legal maximum speed is 120km/h, and even many people will not drive to 120km/h in the 120km/h section of the road, and the power consumption is high but not too high. Between slightly higher power consumption and the additional purchase cost of the gearbox, they may still prefer to choose a slightly higher power consumption.
What's more, the extra weight brought by the gearbox will actually affect the most sensitive range of electric vehicles. Similarly, if manufacturers want an electric vehicle to have better power performance at low speed and high speed, instead of adding a slightly complex gearbox, it is better to simply and rudely increase the motor power.
The conclusion is that the gearbox is useful for electric vehicles, can be available, but not necessarily.
Of course, there are electric cars with transmissions on the market, such as the Porsche Taycan and Audi e-tron, which have some in common, such as being born in Germany, which needs to fly at high speeds, and their prices are not cheap.
Audi e-tron: Yes, I also have a gearbox
Toyota, can you figure it out?
After the things between the electric vehicle and the gearbox are torn, it is time to return to the beginning of the matter, Toyota applied for a manual transmission patent specially developed for electric vehicles, what is this picture?
For civilian electric vehicles, the gearbox is already a thing that is not too necessary, and then a manual gearbox is more redundant. In fact, according to Toyota's patent information, they equipped the electric vehicle with a virtual clutch, using the torque within the available range of the motor to simulate the torque curve of the oil car, and simulate the corresponding speed of each gear, and present it to the driver with a simulated tachometer.
Yes, there is no real clutch, there is no real gear, it's all simulated. It turns out that "false singing" is not the highest state of self-congratulation, and the fake manual gearbox is (and maybe not).
Toyota, you are so good, you can think of it!
I suspect that since the output of the motor is so delicate and agile, it is probably not a problem to simulate the ups and downs when changing gears, and even want to use the motor to simulate a variety of different dynamic response characteristics, such as the more naturally aspirated, or the serious hysteresis of the large turbine, which seems to open the door to a new world. And when you don't want to open the manual transmission, you can also directly use it as an ordinary electric car to drive.
Using this method to "find" the pleasure of opening the manual transmission is really a bit of a shoe scratch. I'd say that for a manual-operated enthusiast, they probably don't want a manual-operated electric car, whether it's a simulated manual transmission or really one. Because opening the manual transmission, you want that pure driving feeling, and driving the manual transmission is the highest degree of human-vehicle integration.
In fact, Toyota is not the first time to have such an idea, in 2017, they released a GR HV SPORTS concept car at the Tokyo Motor Show, this shape is obviously based on the then 86 to remove the roof of the car "Targa" after the reference to the endurance race car TS050 magic modified from the body of a set of THS-R hybrid system. There is a manual H-type gear lever in the car, and the manual gear of the electric vehicle we are talking about this time is in the same line as the GR HV SPORTS concept car, because the H-type gear lever of the GR HV SPORTS concept car is also available or not, and it is only necessary to use it after cutting into the manual mode.
▲ Behold, this H-shaped gear lever and the "PRND" button on the panel seem to be about to fight
Perhaps when there are no more oil cars in the world, Toyota's "manual transmission" designed for electric vehicles will appear to have some nostalgic significance. It should be noted that this is the "time when there is no longer 'existing' oil trucks", not "no longer 'producing' oil trucks", because even if the world bans the sale of cars with internal combustion engines, we can still enjoy pure driving pleasure through the stock of manual fuel trucks.
I guess in my lifetime, I won't need a "manual electric car" that will allow me to regain my driving pleasure in a simulated self-congratulatory way.
As for our descendants, perhaps by the time they can drive, they will no longer accept the backward product of the oil car, and they naturally will not want to find anything through "manual electric vehicles".
Issue 1831
Author: Chen Houze