Have you ever gone car shop­ping? You visit one showroom after another and collect bro­chures. Some call a car an AMT gearbox or a CVT or a fully auto­matic or even a DSG, but so far as you care, they are all automatic. Well, you’re not exactly wrong, but you are not completely right either. To be clear, any form of clutch-less drive is known as an automatic. But there’s more to an automatic than a missing clutch pedal in your car. Here we break down the most used versions of automatic trans­mission systems in our country, tailor-made for an everyday driver to understand the “what is what” of automated transmission.

AMT

Automated Manual Transmission, just as the name suggests, automates the manual transmission in your car. AMT consists of a hydraulic actuator system and an electronic control unit, which work in conjunction to simply engage and disengage the clutch while shifting gears. Basically, your AMT car has a clutch, but not a physical clutch pedal that you can see; instead the system is doing the tiring work of pressing the clutch and shifting gears for you.

CVT

Continuously Variable Transmis­sion is a giant leap from the AMT towards a fully automated gearbox because a CVT doesn’t have a clutch at all. The CVT system consists of a single unique gear that can change through a continuous range of effec­tive gear ratios, responding only to the throttle, much like, you guessed it, a scooter. You operate a CVT car the same way you would a normal automatic transmission, although the actual inner workings are much different. CVT relies on a belt and pulley system. Instead of having gears, there are two pulleys con­nected by a belt. The engine turns one pulley and the other pulley is connected to the rest of the trans­mission and powers the wheels of the car.

DSG

Direct Shift Gearbox is a dual clutch gearbox that is designed with two electronically controlled clutches. In simple words, it’s two totally independent clutches work­ing in a single box. Using a pair of clutches means that as one clutch disengages a gear, the other one engages the next at the same time, effectively eliminating the time spent in neutral between changing gears. The obvious big advantage of a DSG is its much faster shift time.

AT

Automatic Transmission or fully automatic transmission use gears to match engine speed to road speed. There is a combination of different gear ratios, usually a total of six (but sometimes as many as nine) that are chosen so that the engine can remain in a range to produce the best amount of torque.

It automatically changes gear using a fluid coupling called a torque converter and a series of epicyclic gears engaged by band-clutches within the transmission itself. The gear ratio is changed hydraulically, locking and unlocking the system of gears, and you don’t have to depend on a clutch to change gears in the vehicle. More sophisticated AT transmissions also have different shift programs and can come with paddle shift systems.

Well, there you have it. The next time you go car shopping, take this issue with you. We firmly believe you won’t be as clueless when you see the brochures stating the dif­ferent gearboxes of the cars you will potentially buy and maybe you might teach even teach a thing or two about the different gearboxes to the salespersons themselves.