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.