Transmissions? Who Needs Them?

Of course any vehicle that contains internal energy for the purpose of moving from place to place must have a means to transmit that energy to whatever drives it. It may be as simple as a copper wire or as complex as an eighteen wheeler.

The day is coming when elaborate gear sets will become as obsolete as hand cranks on automobiles. Ten years ago I came up with a design that used a battery and an Algae derived bio-fuel to run a Gen-set. At that time, I thought that oil derived from Algae was the best source of alternative energy. Now I'm not so sure.

An exciting approach is providing external energy to the automotive drive. Certainly this is not new. Just look at San Francisco's Cable Car system. Atlanta once had the most amazing Electric powered bus system, driven by two overhead wires. Aesthetics did away with them, much to the chagrin of thousands of daily passengers.

A recent proposal is, to bury electric wires in all of our roadways and use this infrastructure to provide induction power to all road transport. A relatively small battery would get you from home to the nearest buried power source. All of this system could be made seamlessly by proper design and engineering.

I have owned Hybrid automobiles with Continuously Variable Transmissions (CVT) for about ten years. It didn't take me long to realize that I would never go back to clunky, jerky Automatic transmissions. The day will come when pushing on an accelerator will transmit a variable signal to an escapement that will tell all four wheels what direction to turn and how much torque to apply.

It's not written in stone that you can only use one, two or four electric motors. How about sixteen small ones? Properly controlled they would enable a very smooth and efficient acceleration. They may even have external rotor, highly efficient electric motors. The transmitting of the drivers wishes could be a simple wire or it could even be wireless. After all, the keyboard I am typing on is wireless. It hasn't missed a stroke in over a year.