Yahoo Autos We Drive Toyota's EV Prototype with a Manual Transmission
When we started our campaign to Save the Manuals in 2010, we never imagined a future like this—a psuedo-manual gearbox for an EV. Toyota’s prototype features both an H-pattern gear shifter and a clutch pedal, but although the idea might sound like a spoof, the effort that has already been put into it proves that Toyota is serious amount making a production version.
The idea of a manual-transmission EV is, from a functionality point of view, completely pointless. The flat torque curves of electric motors, especially their ability to produce peak output from a standstill, is key to the drivability of electric cars. Imposing artificial limits on output is always going to reduce overall performance.
Toyota’s logic is that an artificial manual gearbox will bring back some of the engagement that is lost in the electric driving experience. Other automakers have had similar ideas, as Hyundai already let us experience the production-ready Ioniq 5 N’s e-shift system. But the Hyundai system uses steering-wheel paddles to control its synthesized ratios. Toyota has gone one better with both an H-gate shifter and a clutch pedal.
How It Works
The prototype system has, somewhat improbably, been fitted to a Lexus UX300e, an electric version of the small UX crossover. It is able to switch between its conventional drive modes and the manual mode by pressing a new "engine start" button. The new hardware consists of a six-speed shifter with microswitches at each position rather than any physical connection, plus a clutch pedal with an extra-strong return spring to give natural weighting. The clutch is connected to nothing more than a potentiometer. Everything else is done by software.
Our drive was limited to the test track at Toyota’s vast Shimoyama Engineering Center in Japan. It was enough to prove that an EV can give an impressively close impression of a manual gearbox working with a combustion engine, but not an exact one—at least not yet.
The manual EV has a control map which basically replicates the characteristics of a high-output four-cylinder engine, giving a maximum value at a given engine "speed"—this being simulated by software, and relayed by both (in the prototype) an aftermarket tachometer and a synthesized engine note. The gear selected determines engine speed at given road speed and, once the peak simulated revs are reached, the system cuts power progressively, doing a convincing impression of a rev limiter.
The use of the clutch pedal is another complicating factor. Pressing the clutch pedal simultaneously with the gas pedal pressed in the prototype progressively cuts acceleration, as it would on a real manual, with engine revs rising as the load diminishes. However, there were no simulated burning smells.
