Why Electric Vehicles Have Only One Gear

When it comes to the transmissions in their cars, almost all Americans prefer automatics, and increasingly few of our millennials even know how to drive standard (manual) transmissions.

To many of us seniors, people who drive high-end sports cars with automatic transmissions are missing the point.  Maserati knows that Europeans still enjoy the authority that they have over how their cars perform, but they no longer import standard transmissions into the United States.  Fewer than 5% of Corvettes on the road have standard transmissions, but, again, to me, these people have already shown that they “miss this point” of driving, simply by their choice of cars.

When I became an environmentalist after a lifetime of BMWs, I knew that eight-cylinder 4+ liter engines no longer lay in my future, and that hybrids or pure battery electric meant that manual transmissions were for me, regrettably, a thing of my past.

Here’s a video explaining the physics behind internal combustion engines’ needing multiple gears, and why I will never again hold a stick shift in my hand, nor depress a clutch with my left foot.