While all the luxury car makers in India offer only automatic transmission in their cars in India, things are quite different in Europe and America. People who buy these luxury cars drive themselves and don’t give their vehicles to the chauffeur. Thus automakers offer manual transmission variants of their performance vehicles. Now BMW has filed a patent for a 7-speed manual gearbox and these patent images have leaked online. The patents were filed last year and one can expect the 7-speed gearbox to make it a production BMW car as soon as next year.
But BMW is not the first car maker in the world to develop a 7-speed manual gearbox. That credit goes to Porsche for offering a 7-speed manual gearbox on the 911 in 2011. The patent images reveal how the Bavarian automaker is trying to address the most prominent issues with manual transmission which have more than 6-gears. Higher number of gears result in the gears being positioned too closely which increases the chance of a wrong gear selection. What BMW is trying to do is, offer a manual shifter which doesn’t allow sudden or jerky gear shifts.
How does BMW ensure that? Well the German automaker has used electrorheologic or magnetorheologic fluids around the shift gates, with an electronic system. These rely on various sensors, which apply electric voltage to change the viscosity of the fluid. What they end up doing is blocking certain gearshifts, thereby ensuring the driver doesn’t end up in the wrong gear by mistake. Sounds quite complicated but its sure to work efficiently. BMW can even offer a 8-speed manual gearbox in the future, using the same technology. But don’t expect a manual transmission-ed Bimmer in India anytime soon.
Source – E90Post