Gadgetory

your typical combustion engine passenger car has always put its power out through a transmission either a three five seven nine today even a 10 speed gearbox the reason that gearbox is in there is because your engines got a relatively narrow range of rpms and sweet spot for power yet your car runs at a wide range of speeds and offers different load requirements so you broker the difference with a wide range of gears but the overall problem with transmissions as amazing as they've become is that they remain a crutch ideally you'd rather not have one for three very good reasons first of all transmissions tend to be heavy and complex they're one of the most elaborate things in the modern car secondly they're expensive largely as a result of being heavy and complex expensive to put in expensive to fix that's on you and of course they tend to introduce some slop and some slow gear changes now that's been improved a lot lately but wouldn't it be nice to take all this out so Koenigsegg says we can do that because of two interesting trends in power trains one we have higher rpm high-performance engines and turbos give them better lower end grunt secondly we have very torquey electric motors that are quite well proven these days electric motors have all their torque from zero on up and can spin in a wide range of rpm put it all together here and maybe your powertrain has a wide enough range of rpms and abilities to deliver power that it doesn't need gears to help let's take a look at how they lay that out here's the spine of the car you can see you've got a vertical battery pack up in between the seats basically that brings you down to the turbocharged gas engine which has an electric motor on the back side turning the crank when it needs to - more electric motors are back here that go out to your drive shaft to your rear wheels and in the middle there is a fluid coupler and a final drive here's how that looks in a schematic this fluid coupler and final drive do two important things if you didn't have that you'd have basically the automotive equivalent of a fixie a fixed-gear machine and that's not really useful in the practical world and then you do have a gearbox of sorts a reduction gear it's a single speed transmission that never changes so it's very simple it's basically a free two ones of the gas engine can run at the higher rpms which is its sweet spot without having to drive the car at like 60 to 180 miles an hour all the time now I'm not saying that this is the beyond end-all in future drive trains we may never see this again but it does underline two important trends engines that have more grunt because of Augmented intakes from turbos and superchargers and electric motors that can pick up the slack where gas engines don't do so well put it all together you've got a spectrum of power that maybe doesn't need to change gears one day