The Gearbox is Obsolete.

This sounds suspiciously like an advertisement, so I have not checked the link.

A speed variator? Is that not the principle of a CVT? That idea has been around for a while. See the work of Leonardo da Vinci.

It does sound like an advertisement.

However, if the question, "The question now is :How do you convince the manufacturers?" is real, then:

Drop it in a race car and if you start winning races with it manufactures will stand up and take notice.

Racing drives the technology in your average passenger car. Anything that passes the muster on the track and provide a competitive edge will find its way into commuter vehicles sooner or later.

If the post is purely to toot your own horn with what you feel is a superior product, you are not on the right track here. Besides, Honda has already produced CVTs and no one has taken the technology further probably because it is an inferior technology when you add up all the pluses and minuses.

No - I don't expect to find here manufacturers looking for new ideas. I expect to find people who try to improve something but have difficulties promoting change.

On one hand we have seen a lot of changes in the past 59 years. On the other hand there are some simples improvements that seem impossible to achieve.

Thank you for the idea of the sports car. Technology may have to enter our life in a certain way.

Welcome to CR4!

Racing is how it has been done fore many, many decades. Look to Formula 1 for some of the most amazing technologies, but F1 doesn't drive all the innovations.

Another thing to consider, engineers do not drive technologies, companies do. Some engineers go on to either start their own companies or work their way up to CEO, but the bottom line is engineers do not exist in a vacuum and and it takes a team of many disciplines to make it happen.

Generally, most engineers do a brilliant job of applying science to solve problems, but have a poor ability to see or grasp the complete picture.

If you feel you fall outside the norm, have at it. However, start by making a business case for your concept. Usually, that takes a lot more work than most people imagine.

They probably don't take much notice because its just basically a variable belt drive system like a common snowmobile clutch. There are even simpler versions of your idea that have been used in off road equipment many years ago like 40 - 450+ years ago which means you are about 2 generations late on the concept.

The variable belt drive systems where superseded by the modern variable displacement hydrostatic pump and motor configurations now seen in equipment ranging from push mowers up to multi thousand horsepower mining machine drive systems. They offer equal to superior efficiency and infinite reduction ratios beyond what a variable belt drive can plus also allow for more compact size for equal power and can work indefinitely at high overload slippage rates that will kill a belt drive in seconds.

If you have ever owned a variable belt drive riding lawn mower and a hydrostatic drive riding lawn mower you would know there is no comparison on the service and working life of two systems. The belt drive is high maintenance and costly compared to the hydrostatic drive systems that often out last the rest of the mower even with zero maintenance done to them in their life time.

I hope this gives you a better understanding of why your invention has no one interested. Its too old and has long since been out engineered.

How long before the rubber band breaks?

I think that Toyota has an answer to that question.

It could also be interestting to put a torque converter between the 2 shafts of the differential.

That would be the wrong place, but by now I have learned to expect that.

The Torotrack system offers benefits similar to your idea, and is being implemented in lawn tractors as an alternative to hydrostatic drives (under the Infinitrak name).

I suspect that your claim that "the gearbox is obsolete" may put people off. Gearboxes are anything but obsolete -- so your claim makes you sound rather poorly-informed. Double-clutch gearboxes have made their way from race cars to Porsches and now into even economy cars like the Ford Fiesta. Although the Ford unit is not particularly refined (hunting for the right ratio at low speeds), it offers very good economy (which would not be significantly improved by a CVT.)

Fans of CVT transmissions sometimes imagine that a CVT will provide better performance or better fuel efficiency than a manual gearbox. Audi demonstrated that this is not the case, many years ago, with tests of their 5 speed manual gearbox car and their CVT-equipped car. (They performed the same -- very slightly better than a conventional automatic trans of the day.) Now, the case is worse for CVTs, because double clutch gearboxes offer both more ratios and faster shifting than manual transmissions (granted with very high parts count).

Gearboxes or CVTs alone do not solve the problem of low engine loading at cruise speeds and low speeds. The combination of a CVT and and a hybrid system, which loads the engine more effectively (and permits operation at low loads without using the engine, and permits shutting off the engine at stops) can, as the Prius and Honda Insight demonstrate, improve fuel efficiency -- at the cost of complexity.

A CVT alone does not allow for engine downsizing, as your website seems to suggest.

CVTs can be problematic, even when engineered by companies with a good track record for engineering.

Those are some of the issues you face.

How should I go about it?

I suppose you could build a prototype, install it in a vehicle, and demonstrate the advantages.

Drive a Nissan Cube. Its CVT works very smoothly, and would be hard to improve upon -- and it is already well-engineered and on the market. What "problem" with the Nissan Cube transmission would your device solve? Prepare that list and approach Nissan.

Perhaps revise your website so that it contrasts your design with the Torotrack implementation or the Nissan implementation. It is unclear to me why anyone would want to tool up for another transmission variation. The Torotrak seems to have all the advantages of your design, but is more compact.

Perhaps talk with the people at Ford who decided to go with a double clutch gearbox on the Fiesta instead of a CVT. Find out what they were thinking about.

You might attempt to follow in Torotrak's footsteps and get into the lawn tractor market. Road vehicles do not require a very large ratio spread, whereas a creeper gear is handy on a lawn tractor. (Thus, you see lawn tractors -- and other off road equipment -- with hydrostatic transmissions, but you never see them on road cars.)

Both your implementation and the Torotrack can have "geared neutrals," eliminating the need for a clutch. Honda's CVT chattering problems seem to be clutch-related, so perhaps you can approach them, if they do not already have similar patents.

Torotrack has had some visibility as a result of the Flybrid system used in Formula One. Trying to gain such visibility could help your effort, but it is anything but easy.

Industrial machinery market?

Your solution has been already used in series by a dutch manufacturer in a small street car. This happened about 60 years ago. This means that industry wanted a continuous solution and that later solutions appeared to be better. The life expectancy of the transmission belt was very satisfactory. An other solution was also developed with a "push belt" using several elements of high quality steels in contact and maintained together by a very high quality thin steel band. The limits of the "pulling belt" you suggest was the transmitted power so that for bigger transmissions the "pushing" solution was considered as better. However its complexity limited the introduction.

It occurs to me that another thing that might help your efforts is to learn more about existing transmissions and how they are used in cars. For example, you write "To fill the gap between a motor running at constant speed and the wheels are variable speeds engineers have used clutches, torque converters, gearbox, differentials...." In fact, automotive engines do not run at constant speed, and running at a constant speed is not desirable: imagine the racket (and needless engine wear and fuel consumption) created if an engine idled at 3600 rpm, or ran at 3600 rpm when crawling through low speed traffic.

There are optimum engine speeds and loads for various operating conditions, and a modern automatic transmission comes close to keeping the engine at optimum efficiency for the given operating condition. Because both modern CVTs and automatics are computer-controlled, if you compare operating rpm vs road speed for a CVT-equipped car and a car with a conventional automatic, you will find that the profiles are very close to being the same. The only difference with the CVT is that the engine speed varies more continuously. However, many modern CVT transmissions actually implement discrete speeds for driver involvement and for feel. Although the very smooth changes of a CVT would seem to be a plus, large segments of the market prefer discrete speeds -- and it is at the low end of the market where discrete speeds are not implemented on CVT transmissions (the Nissan Cube being an example). (The sportier Honda Fit w/ CVT has seven discrete speeds and paddle shifters.)

Also, you might do some market research. Are people asking for creeper gears in cars? Existing CVT cars have both adequately low lows and high highs, it seems, unless you have market research data that indicates otherwise. I have a new Honda Civic with electronic throttle and conventional five-speed automatic and can find very little to complain about. In low gear, it has sufficient torque to easily break traction on a dry road... so any more is unnecessary. The shifts are nearly seamless, aided by automated throttle reduction at the changes. It doesn't hunt between gears on hills. There is very little not to like, and this is a simple low cost transmission.

(All modern CVT oil bath transmissions require very sophisticated and expensive oils which both provide traction but also low friction. I've read that an oil change can be $400. This is an area you might want to research.)

So: more facts, less hype, more market reseach... and perhaps focusing on a market segment where a broader ratio spread is advantageous, such as off-road. That would, however, put you in direct competition with the already established Torotrack people.

Thank you MoronicBumble. Lots of good suggestions. It seems that engineers have found a way to compensate for all the imperfections of the gearbox.

I still believe that the gearbox is a problem waiting for a solution. When we were using film photography we could not imagine that it will be replaced by digital cameras. Sooner or later, one way or another, the gearbox will be replaced with something better. When that happens people will say: "It was so simple! How come it took you so long?" That will be the time to remind them that it took mankind 5000 years to make a bicycle. We are now moving a little bit faster but that does not mean that we are geniuses. We still have not figured out how the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. Our great achievements, such as our computers, are made of the juxtaposition of millions of simple ideas. We still go through the three steps: #1 "It will not work" and #2"Try it but don't mention my name" and #3 "I was the first one to think of it."

I am always surprised at the ingenuity in the details I can find in old cars. It seems that there was more brain juice in old cars than in the new ones. The reason may be that modern cars are made by teams of people using computers. The human side gets diluted.

I am always surprised at the ingenuity in the details I can find in old cars. It seems that there was more brain juice in old cars than in the new ones. The reason may be that modern cars are made by teams of people using computers. The human side gets diluted.

Essentially, I agree. I remain a Porsche enthusiast, but think that the SUV and four- door are nearly abominations in terms of their effect on the brand identity. (However, they are the vehicles that keep Porsche afloat.) Before design by committee, we had some really distinctive designs and interesting rivalries. (In the 50's and 60's we could not have imagined that Ferrari and Maserati would become the same company, and in the late 60's and the 70's the idea of a Lamborghini with German mechanicals would have seemed ludicrous. VW owning Bentley??!! What could be more ridiculous?

On the other hand, my new Civic is far more sophisticated in every way, and performs better, than a small Mercedes of a few decades ago. I just gave my older 2004 Accord its first "tune up" which involved only changing the plugs and air filter, at a bit over 100,000 miles. The only "failure" the Accord has had (aside from tire and battery replacements) was the heating element in an O2 sensor at 80,000 miles... and even that can be considered normal wear. The built-in diagnostics precisely described the problem.

The little body computer of many cars (which does only pretty simple things such as turning the lights off automatically, or letting the radio operate until the doors are opened after shut down) has more "components" (if we consider each transistor junction in an IC to be a component) than an entire car from the 50's. It has become impossible for a mechanical engineer to design a complete car, and to get a whole car design out the door in two or three years requires very large teams. When teamwork works well (as it has in the Japanese companies) the products are very impressive in terms of features, reliability, performance... and some retain some soul (Mazdas are a little more fun that Hondas, which are more fun than Toyotas.)

But despite all the rational benefits of new cars and team engineering, I prefer the old days, and even the not-quite-so-old early Honda days, when you could imagine Sochira himself participating in design discussions... and when the new designs (like the first four cylinder Honda road bikes, or the 5 cylinder 125 race bike) would make your jaw drop.

I suppose for automobiles as appliances, the current system works well. But for automobiles as art (and the art of engineering, embodied) I agree... the human side has been diluted.

Yeah, Pandora's Gearbox, lotsa problems....

The name of the Dutch manufacturer was DAF later bought by Volvo a Swedish company.