Yahoo Autos Jeep Magneto 2.0 Concept Drive | It's a manual EV! Cool?
MOAB, Utah — “Which way should I go?” I ask Jim Morrison, head of the Jeep brand for North America, as we depart our Easter Jeep Safari base camp outside Moab, Utah, for a little jaunt up and down some gnarly looking rock faces.
He glances at me for a moment, then looks toward the windshield and gestures broadly at the landscape. “It doesn’t matter. A Wrangler on 40s can go anywhere.”
True though that may be, this is no generic Wrangler I’m piloting. It’s the Magneto 2.0, which is Jeep’s second crack at an all-electric 4x4 concept. Magneto itself isn’t new, strictly speaking, but it has come a long way in a year. Version 1.0 boasted 285 horsepower and 273 pound-feet of torque; for 2.0, that’s now 625 horses and 850 lb-ft. A Wrangler on 40s may be able to go anywhere, but we don’t have room to see how fast.
You may be surprised to learn that Jeep didn’t actually upgrade the Magneto’s motors to achieve that output; they were capable of delivering that all along. The new ratings are a combination of new software parameters for the powertrain and an upgraded transmission that could handle the power. A manual transmission, at that — sourced from a Hellcat and dubbed “Tranzilla,” it’s further reinforced above and beyond Hellcat duty in order to handle the Magneto’s monster torque.
An electric car with a manual gearbox is a novel concept for a reason. Strictly speaking, it’s unnecessary. Transmissions exist to help cars take advantage of the relatively narrow band in which internal combustion engines produce usable power and torque. That concept is alien to EV design, at least for most scenarios, since electric motors generate torque from zero up to many, many thousands of RPM before their efficiency drops off. If combustion engines have a power band, electric motors have a power wedge, and it’s a mighty big one.
The cool part is, this makes the Magneto’s manual the easiest one on the planet to use. Since there’s no engine idle to maintain, it can’t be stalled. The clutch exists only to decouple the transmission from the driveline in order to shift gears, which you never really need to do (again, virtually infinite powerband). On paper, this should be the most engaging EV on Earth. In practice, the gearbox is a red herring; you simply pick the gear you want and press the throttle.
