So there you are, in your dream car, accelerating hard from the lights, you feel the surge of thrust build as the speed rapidly climbs and your senses tingle. Then all too suddenly its time to change up a gear, you dip the clutch and for a moment the car is just coasting, all that energy from the engine has gone, what a waste.
And that’s the problem with conventional manual gearboxes, you need to dip the clutch to change gear, so during the shift there is no drive to the wheels which can unsettle a car in a corner and slows acceleration. A typical 0-60 run could have over a second of delay just due to using the clutch, and in motorsport it can easily add up to an extra minuet of acceleration over a 60 lap race.
There are also emission and refinement problems because of the waste of energy during a shift, even DCT style gearboxes don’t really help, and that’s the sort of waste that the modern age will just not tolerate any more.
Of course one way round this is to use an auto box, but just as the car industry is gearing up for a switch to 8 speed autos, along comes a revolutionary idea that all of a sudden puts new life into the conventional manual gearbox.
Yes, its those plucky Brits to the rescue again; a Milton Keynes team of boffins, at aptly named Zeroshift Ltd, have come up with a system that replaces the old synchromesh part of the gearbox and allows seamless gear changes with no interruption of power, that’s right; no interruption, not even a really short one, none at all.
The system uses far fewer parts than a synchro-hub and transfers torque between gears using a pair of latches. As you change gear, one set of latches engage with the next gear which then lifts the other set of latches off the old gear, seamlessly.
You still need a clutch to pull away, but that is automatically operated by the system a bit like the Ferrari F1 paddle-shift. Once on the move all gear changes are clutch-less and can be operated either manually or automatically much like any other ‘flappy paddle’ gearbox.
So far they have tried it out on a number of cars, including an identical (except for the gearbox) pair of Mustangs, with remarkable results. Every time the standard car snatched another gear the Zeroshift equipped car just carried on accelerating, gaining about half a second advantage each time.
I trundled down to the HQ and met controls manager Peter Thomas who is one of a number of people in the team, including MD and inventor Bill Martin, bringing fresh knowledge from the aerospace world.
In their words “The manual and automatic are well established with niche technologies like CVT, AMT and DCT having their own particular benefits. Zeroshift establishes a lead over all these technologies. The benefits of fuel economy, CO2 reduction, performance, shift quality, compactness, light weight and low manufacturing cost are all first rate.”
It would be rude not to try the system for myself, so I had a quick spin in their Jaguar S-Type engineering development car, and I was very impressed. Shifts were as smooth as an auto, no surges, hesitation or harshness, quite simply it was brilliant. With shifts faster than a racing dog box, and refinement to match an auto, there seems no reason to choose anything other than a Zeroshift equipped gearbox.
Currently the company are talking to a number of OEMs, but things move slow in the car industry, it can take 7 years to get a new car into production, so we might have to weight a bit for the first mainstream applications.
But in the mean time there are some very tasty racing projects in the pipeline including some very exciting bike applications.
So how will this change the future? Well, the emissions benefits alone will bring the system to the mass market relatively quickly, plus the fact that standard gearboxes can be fairly easily modified. And the system can replace conventional autos too when coupled to an auto clutch, making both conventional transmissions obsolete at a stroke!