How many gears does man need?
On the occasion of a direct driving comparison between an Austin-Healey 100 BN1 and a BMW Z1, we were confronted with a three-speed and a five-speed gearbox.
In fact, the high-torque 2.7-liter four-cylinder in the Austin-Healey has three forward gears; but these are supplemented by an electrically selectable overdrive, which is hardly needed on country roads and as long as you are constantly changing speed.
The BMW Z1, on the other hand, has five forward gears and you are happy to be able to choose from so many gears, because the straight-six from Munich is not a torque miracle in the 2.5-liter 170 hp version.
Would six or even nine gears, as offered by modern automatic gearboxes, have been better? Hardly, at least not from a driving perspective. In any case, an automatic Z1 is likely to be much less fun to drive than the normal version, where changing gears is a pure joy.
With the Z1, but also with the Austin-Healey, you drive completely differently than with the modern electric car, which only has one gear (sometimes also automatically and barely noticeably changing two gears). But even if electric cars today can accelerate like a tarantula and accelerate super dynamically in every situation, the classic manual gearboxes are simply more fun, because here you not only control the acceleration capacity with the gear selection, but also the acoustic sounds. And here the Austin-Healey 100 and BMW Z1 are almost unbeatable ...
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