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!