Fake and Gay

Guest Post by Eric Peters

It seems everything about American society has become either fake – or gay. Often both. Battery-powered vehicles pretending not to be is a case in point.

Like the battery-powered device Dodge calls Charger – which it kind of is, if you are willing to wait for it. It makes noises that are fake – and so, gay. The usage here is South Park – after the brilliantly written (horribly animated) cartoon show. See also Harley Fags. They are not homosexuals – at least not necessarily.

But they are fags.

Back to gay and fake.

GM is apparently working on a battery powered device with a “clutch.” In order to simulate a manual transmission’s engagement (and disengagement). The word is bracketed in air fingers quote marks because it’s fake – and gay.

The “clutch” will electronically simulate engagement and disengagement. Just like the device called Charger simulates the sounds of the engine it hasn’t got. This “new type of clutch” uses a “a hydraulic actuator to operate a clutch in automatic transmissions used in electric cars. A controller would vary the pressure of the fluid in the actuator, which in turn would move a piston that would open or close the clutch depending on what the controller determines is best in a given scenario.”

Italics added.

In automatic transmissions.

Which do not use clutches because there is no need for a clutch – in the manual transmission sense – to disengage the engine’s rotating flywheel from the transmission, so as to enable the engine to continue running when the vehicle isn’t moving. If the driver of a car equipped with a manual transmission does not depress the clutch (or put the transmission in neutral) the engine will stall as the vehicle comes to a stop because the engine can’t turn the Earth. When the driven wheels stop turning, so does the engine – if the driver hasn’t depressed the clutch (or put the transmission in neutral).

It’s true there are automatics with clutches . . . inside them. You have probably heard of them (e.g., dual-clutch automatics). These are clutches over which the driver has no control; they are used to rapidly engage (and disengage) sets of gears within the transmission for quicker shifting.

This is not fake or gay because no one pretends dual-clutch automatics are manuals.

What GM has in the works is – per above – is a “controller” (meaning, you don’t control it) that “varies the pressure of the fluid in the actuator.” In other words, a hydraulic circuit of some kind, electronically controlled. A clutch – as such – is an entirely mechanical apparatus operated by a fork that moves the clutch in (and out) and is controlled entirely by the driver’s left foot. It is true that manual-equipped vehicles made since the late 1980s typically have a hydraulic-assist device called a slave cylinder to make it less legwork to engage and disengage the clutch – but this does not change the fundamentally mechanical/non-electronic essence of what a manual transmission and clutch are – and how (and why) they operate.

Devices don’t need clutches because electric motors don’t stall. Because they aren’t always spinning – even when they are on. Try it with an electric drill and see. So it doesn’t matter that the motor is directly connected (physically) to the drive wheels. They rotate when the motor spins. And they don’t when the motor does not. 

Most devices don’t have transmissions, at all. Because they’re not needed. Because electric motors produce tremendous torque and don’t need the leverage of gears (plural) to accelerate the weight of the vehicle. Electric motors also spin faster than engines and there is little worry about the motor coming apart because it is spinning too fast. So there is less need for the gearing reduction of a transmission (automatic or manual) upshifting to the next-highest gear.

But this makes devices boring to drive because they are all the same to drive. Much the same as using a Makita electric drill is about the same experience as using a DeWalt electric drill. This makes it hard to sell devices to people who like to drive.

The solution is obvious. Offer them something they might like to drive – such as a vehicle with an engine and a manual transmission with a clutch they control.

Instead, the manufacturers think that something gay – and fake – will make them want to buy the devices they’re making in lieu of the vehicles people want to buy, in part because the latter aren’t all the same except for their shapes and colors.

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