I’m stuck on this personally. I love my manual, I have a tiny little Mazda 2 and I have driven that thing absolutely everywhere because I can control it better than any automatic I’ve ever driven. But I’ve been casually looking for a new car and I’d love to have an electric, but I don’t want to lose that level of control and everything I love about a manual.
What do you all think? What’s your take?
Isn’t there a large difference between automatic and electric?
The automatic still has gears, they’re just… Automatic. The EV doesn’t have any kind of traditional gears. Unless, perhaps, if they have a variable frequency drive or something similar.
Either way, I haven’t driven much automatic nor electric, but I’ve heard that the control of an electric should be unparalleled.
If anyone knows more, then please feel free to correct me.
Aside from the obvious, an automatic and how they handle shifting makes a difference in how acceleration is handled vs an electric. CVT transmissions, if they were allowed to operate how they are suppose to instead of adding fake shifting to stop idiotic complaints, would perform more like how an electric accelerates without the torque. Being able to just accelerate without the transmission deciding what gear to be in is a big advantage of electrics, but largely unimportant to typical driving.
The Porsche Taycan has 2 gears, but you don’t control the shifting. I don’t know if the incomming Porsche EVs will also have gears. I expect electrics to go to some number of gears to increase efficiency to extend range, but maybe everyone is banking on battery tech improving to avoid the additional cost of adding gears.
I’m not sure what you mean by “control”. Do you mean handling?
Thank you for the elaboration.
I ended up mixing two definitions of “control” in my tiredness, whoops.
I intended to refer to OPs “control”, which I imagine is supposed to be the ability to use low/high gears as the situation requires, such as going a gear lower when overtaking, or using a high gear when cruise on the common roads for better fuel efficiency. Automatic often (always?) allows or perhaps even forces these modi, but it doesn’t always feel satisfactory when you’re used to stick, at least not the older models.
I guess I ended up using “control” as “ability to handle varying power and speed (aka. torque) requirements”, which gives the EV a clear advantage as it can change speed and power while maintaining a constant torque.
The thing is the concerns for control are pretty much moot in an EV.
Need torque right this second to overtake regardless of speed? It’s already there. Want efficient operation when you don’t need acceleration? It’s got the efficiency, even though it still has the power. Want a higher gear for a quieter ride? The EV is quiet all the time. Need a lower gear because you are going down a mountain and need engine braking to spare the brakes? EV constantly wants to do regenerative breaking so the brakes aren’t the first resort for allowing down anyway.
Now automatics try and are generally good at naturally providing for most of these. However you can feel them changing gears and may sometimes disagree with the shift point, e.g. the automatic may delay shifting more than I would because it wants to keep the general power band higher even if I know I can tolerate a bit slower ride for quieter engine. There’s also the delay when you punch it and it downshifts. In real terms, it’s almost certainly faster than your downshifting, but it feels worse because you are waiting on something else instead of it being your actions being part of the delay. Also you might want to downshift before pushing the pedal instead of a reaction to pushing the pedal. In any event, all but the most superficial concerns are not applicable to an EV.