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For those who find electric cars a bit boring, Toyota engineers are working on a realistic-feeling fake manual transmission as a possible feature.
To be clear, a manual transmission on an electric car would serve absolutely no purpose. It would be just for fun, an add-on for people who like shifting gears in their gasoline-powered cars.
Toyota, long skeptical of electric vehicles, has been planning a more aggressive push into the sector. That will mean finding ways to appeal to all sorts of consumers. A feature like this could help lure holdouts who aren’t attracted to an electric vehicle’s usual smoothness and simplicity.
Even among gasoline-powered cars, most sold in the United States today have automatic transmissions that shift gears with no driver input. Manual transmissions, in which a driver has to press a clutch pedal and move a stick around to select different gears, are usually offered as options on performance cars or, in some cases, extremely cheap cars. They are more common in other parts of the world, though, including Europe.
