BMW, a German automaker is apparently hard at work designing and developing a new groundbreaking 7-speed manual gearbox, a series of patent pics procured from German office have unveiled. A website dedicated to 2011 BMW 3 Series, E90 Post, revealed information and images, which show what appears to be standard BMW gear lever with 7-speed pattern in addition to more complex rendering which shows off new technology engineered for optimizing gear selections. Albeit, at present Porsche provides the 7-speed manual gearbox in its newest 911, the setup of BMW is less traditional. Porsche utilizes its top gear like overdrive, where it’s engineered for reducing fuel consumption.
The new seven-speed transmission designed by BMW would feel like the 6-speed gearbox; however would provide extra offered ratios. With 9, 8 or 7 gears, automated and automatic gearboxes have an efficiency benefit as additional gears enable for more economical gear ratios. The manual gearbox can’t match this as spacing of gears become quite close to each other. As per the design, the shift gates are encircled by an electrorheologic or magnetorheologic fluid. Depending on several sensors, the computerized shifting module computes that which gears are wrong to choose and gears are proper, given the driving condition). For preventing an unseemly shift, an electric voltage or magnetic field is applied for changing the fluid’s viscosity that will actually block engaging of certain gears.
