Twin Stick to mDRIVE

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Twin Stick to mDRIVE: A Short History of Transmission Technology

During a visit to the Mack Customer Center and Museum in Allentown, PA, I had a chance to compress almost 60 years of transmission history into a single day.  If you think we have a driver shortage today, thank your lucky stars we aren’t trying to coax new drivers into the industry with twin stick gearboxes!

If there’s anything a driver needed in the days way before the mDRIVE automated manual transmission was introduced in 2010, it was manual dexterity. I re-discovered that when I got behind the wheel of a 1957 B-Model Mack. After grinding my way around the track, I was more than happy to time travel back to the present and get behind the wheel of a truck equipped with an automated manual transmission. That being said, I did have an awful lot of fun out on the track that day!

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Jim Park was a CDL driver and owner-operator from 1978 until 1998, when he began his second career as a trucking journalist. During that career transition, he hosted an overnight radio show on a Hamilton, Ontario radio station and later went on to anchor the trucking news in SiriusXM's Road Dog Trucking channel. Jim is a regular contributor to Today's Trucking and Trucknews.com, and produces Focus On and On the Spot test drive videos.


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