EVs are mostly bereft of gears or any kind of transmission, but in the recent past manufacturers like Porsche have experimented with transmissions to provide better driving engagement. To be precise only EVs by the Volkswagen group - the Porsche Taycan and the Audi E-Tron GT have transmissions. But Toyota which till recently has been very cagey of electric power trains seems to be pushing things up a notch or two as it has filled patents for a manual transmission for electric vehicles.
Toyota is looking to implement a system that isn't too dissimilar from what it provides on vehicles using the internal combustion engine paired with a manual gearbox. Usually, even when a car based on the internal combustion engine is converted to an EV, the cars are left in a single gear which is either third or fourth depending on the motor's specification and maximum RPM levels. This is the reason there is no clutch as there is no shifting happening.
As per the Japanese carmaker's patent filling, drawings indicate the use of a special controller that alters torque of the electric motor just the way it would happen in a petrol vehicle. It even mentions are real clutch pedal that the driver will press in order to change the gear by moving a physical shifter. That being said, there is some ambiguity as it is being referred to being a pseudo shifter and pseudo clutch pedal. This probably means that Toyota also knows that their existence is not existential to the car's operations but this would be a feature for enthusiasts who are yearning for driving involvement.
Toyota has just announced its first EV which will debut in Japan
"The controller of the electric vehicle is configured to control the torque of the electric motor using the MT vehicle model based on the operation amount of accelerator pedal, the operation amount of the pseudo-clutch pedal and the shift position of the pseudo-shifter used by the operation of the reaction force actuator. The controller is configured to store shift reaction force characteristic simulating the characteristic of the shift reaction force according to the operation of the shifter. Then, the controller is configured to control the shift reaction force output by the shift reaction force generator according to the operation of the pseudo-shifter using the stored shift reaction force characteristic,"explains Toyota in its filing.
Toyota could be planning electric cars with sporty characteristics that could be providing this extra functionality. It should be noted, Toyota's CEO, Akko Toyoda, is known to be a sports car enthusiast and was the man behind the revival of the "Supra" brand - and even if there is not much market research to back up this move, it could be something to appease its CEO who notoriously has been against EVs till recently.
