When 5G still meant five gears
10/27/2021
"3G" is on everyone's lips, "5G" is mainly for mobile phone users, or so it seems. But a few years ago, "5G" stood for something else. The abbreviation often appeared in used car advertisements and these usually had to be paid for per line. The abbreviation 5G for five-speed manual transmission (or similar) saved a lot of money.
The five-speed gearbox already existed in the fifties, but back then it was reserved for top-class sports cars. In the sixties, it was mainly Italian mass-production manufacturers such as Fiat or Alfa Romeo that helped it to break through, but even in the seventies, a four-speed gearbox was still often fitted as standard in everyday cars. Even the Golf GTI originally came with just four gears, although an Alfa Romeo Alfasud already offered five gears for slower models at the time.
By the 1980s, the five-speed gearbox had finally established itself and in the decades that followed, many cars had (at least) one more gear added, which today could be advertised as 6G or even 7G.
