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More gears, less effort—how your car is undergoing a quiet transmission shift

For many years, many folks did not buy automatics in India because they were less fuel-efficient than manuals. Today, with highly complex automatic gearboxes, the opposite is true.

About a decade ago, I visited the then Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan—a suburb directly outside Detroit. We got to drive several vehicles around a test track, including an F-150 pick-up truck. Now, the F-150 has been and remains the best-selling vehicle in the US, and this version was particularly interesting because it had a ten-speed automatic gearbox.

I had certainly come a long way from when I learned to drive—a Maruti with a four-speed manual gearbox, or as the Americans call it, a ‘stick shift’. I remember when Maruti and Daewoo brought in vehicles in the late 90s with a five-speed gearbox. My mother’s driver at the time was extremely suspicious of the fifth gear and refused to use it. Today, many manual vehicles come with six-speed gearboxes. 

Automatics, on the other hand, well, that ten-speed gearbox from Ford made it into the last couple of years of production on the Endeavour, but that was still expensive and had limited appeal. But now, Skoda Auto has given the Kushaq SUV a makeover, and part of that makeover is a new eight-speed automatic gearbox mated to the one-litre TSI motor. 

And given that the Kushaq is in the popular CSUV market and shares its mechanical underpinnings with several other vehicles from the Skoda-Volkswagen family, it is only a matter of time before this gearbox comes onto other vehicles as well. In fact, this gearbox is sourced from Japanese manufacturer Aisin, which also supplied the earlier six-speed automatic. 

Automatics have higher efficiency

Aisin, a Toyota-affiliated company, also supplies the same........

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