When we started the Save the Manuals effort in 2010, we had no idea that an electric vehicle would have a transmission that works like a manual one. The H-shaped gear shifter and clutch pedal on Toyota’s prototype may look like a joke, but the work that has already been done on it shows that the company is serious about making a commercial car. From a practical point of view, thinking about buying an electric car with a manual drive is pointless. Electric motors’ flat power curves and their ability to produce maximum output from a stop are very important for making electric cars driveable. Putting artificial limits on output will always lead to a drop in total performance. Toyota thinks that a fake manual transmission will help to bring back the feeling of involvement that you lose when driving an electric car. Other automakers have put forward similar ideas. Hyundai has already shown us the e-shift system of the Ioniq 5 N, which is ready for production. The Hyundai technology, on the other hand, controls its artificial ratios with buttons on the steering wheel. Toyota really went the extra mile by adding a clutch pedal along with the H-gate gear. How It Performs It was a surprise that the test system was put on a small UX SUV called the Lexus UX300e. A new “engine start” button can be used to switch between manual and normal drive modes. Some of the new parts are a clutch pedal with an extra-strong return spring that makes it naturally weighted and a six-speed shifter that has microswitches at each position instead of any physical connections. There is only a control on the clutch. After that, the software will handle everything else for you. The only place we went was on the test track at Toyota’s huge Shimoyama Engineering Center in Japan. That was enough to show that, for now, an electric car can make a very good, if not perfect, copy of a manual transmission working with a combustion engine. The control map for the manual EV is a lot like the control map for a high-output four-cylinder engine. The highest value that the test engine makes at a certain “speed” is shown by an aftermarket tachometer and a software-generated engine note. At a certain road speed, the engine speed is set by the gear that is chosen. When the simulated top speed is reached, the device gradually lowers power, making it look like a rev limiter is in use. Another problem is using the clutch pedal. The prototype’s clutch and gas pedals can be hit at the same time, like in a real manual, to slow down the car gradually. As the load on the engine decreases, it revs higher. There was no smell of fake fire, though. Likening It to a Guide The sample held up well even when we tried to trick it. When you let go of the clutch and shift into a lower gear, the car coasts and boosts regenerative braking, which acts like the engine stopping. In order to match the revs when moving down, you can briefly press the accelerator while the clutch is fully lowered. If you let go of the clutch too quickly after shifting into a low gear, you might get a shift shock that makes the electric motors briefly overrev. In the same way, trying to speed up without applying enough revs can cause a virtual stop. Also, by mixing the sixth gear, the full accelerator, and a stated 1500 rpm, it may make it feel like the engine is overworking itself in a too-low gear, causing slow acceleration and low-frequency noise that sounds like the engine juddering on its mounts. Do not be alarmed; it was still possible to tell that this new world was only a simulation. The prototype’s shifting mechanism was too light, going from setting to setting more like a video game joystick than a real option. (The mechanical team knows that the springs need to be loaded more.) The position and speed of the throttle could be heard along with the engine sounds that were made, but they were way too loud when the speed was slowed down for authenticity. The technical team found out that the prototype was using a sound map from a Volkswagen Golf that had been bought in a store. Also, making mistakes doesn’t have any consequences. We quickly learned that the clutch pedal was not necessary at all and that we could change gears instantly, even with the throttle fully engaged. At 60 miles per hour, a planned “money shift” first showed that any gear could be chosen at any speed. So, the prototype’s rev counter reached 10,000 rpm, but no accurate picture of a real engine exploding into dirty pieces was made. Will it happen? The idea seemed a lot less wild after we drove the manual EV. On a racetrack or canyon road, it’s easy to see why people might want to drive an electric car. But it takes a lot of work to picture people wishing to sit in traffic or go around towns in one. Hyundai experts were right when they said that drivers may be better able to adjust to the different speeds needed for each turn of a circuit if they choose the right gear. Toyota is also working on the idea of electric cars (EVs) with dynamic traits that can be changed. For example, the sound system and engine profiles could be downloaded and used in different EVs. A future electric car might have modes for the Toyota Tundra, the Lexus LFA, and the GR86. The more realistic problem with putting the system into a regular car is that there needs to be room for a shifter. This did happen in a Lexus small SUV, but it’s not likely to occur in any other car except the ones that are designed with the driver in mind. The forged manual is most likely to have been sent to the production model of the FT-Se sports car concept, which was shown off in Tokyo last week.
