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Ford’s push towards ever-greater fuel economy in their truck line continues apace with advances in their EcoBoost engine range and the addition of . . . hold on a second. Does that headline say a TEN speed transmission"
[goes and checks headline]
Whoa! They’re serious. Day-um Ford, that?s a significant swing of the bat right there, especially with the EcoBoost engine. Okay, just to get a little bit of technical background out of the way, I’ll go ahead and answer the question some of you might be puzzling over:
Why" Why build a transmission with that many ratios in it"
The answer is mainly because of fuel efficiency (which is a real big thing for Ford these days). In an ideal world, Ford’s pickup line would have Continuously Variable Transmissions, or CVTs. But CVTs have an inherent design flaw in that it’s hard to make them strong enough when it comes to torque output. The Magic D
Torque is the raison d’etre of trucks. Say you take your average, full-size truck, and you load the bed up with a bunch of, oh, gravel. Then you hop in, fire it up, put it in drive, and try to get going up that slight incline. A CVT would probably splatter all over the ground at that point. Literally. They just can’t take the high torque loads that scenario would impart to them.
But, in a lot of ways, having a transmission with 10 speeds is almost like having a CVT anyway. First off, t...