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A CVT without friction parts or clutches
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The implications are pretty huge if he's right and the numbers come up looking good; as a geared system, the D-Drive is scalable in the extreme, and could remove the need for friction components or manual gearboxes in everything from cars, motorcycles, trucks, industrial and farm equipment, massive marine applications, wind power generators... basically anything that's got an engine.
Because it's all gears and bearings, reliability should be excellent and servicing or repairing the D-Drive a snap. Because you just need to spin (or lock) those control shafts to come up with your final ratio, you could use anything from a fully computerized smart control system to a manually applied pin through the control shaft to change your gear ratios, making it useful in certain very low-tech situations as well as extremely tunable in an automatic automotive application.
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The implications are pretty huge if he's right and the numbers come up looking good; as a geared system, the D-Drive is scalable in the extreme, and could remove the need for friction components or manual gearboxes in everything from cars, motorcycles, trucks, industrial and farm equipment, massive marine applications, wind power generators... basically anything that's got an engine.
Because it's all gears and bearings, reliability should be excellent and servicing or repairing the D-Drive a snap. Because you just need to spin (or lock) those control shafts to come up with your final ratio, you could use anything from a fully computerized smart control system to a manually applied pin through the control shaft to change your gear ratios, making it useful in certain very low-tech situations as well as extremely tunable in an automatic automotive application.
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