


It improves flexibility and gives the car wheels a greater range of motion to work with. That’s precisely why we have drive shaft. With enough force, it will snap the rigid metal in half. When your wheels go over a bump, the wheels will shifts upward but not the transmission. Imagine that if your car wheels are connected to the transmission by a rigid metal instead of a drive shaft.

This is Perodua Myvi drive shaft set, showcasing both the drive shafts from the side view. This is not a discussion of who’s right or wrong, but to establish a common set of definition so that we will be on the same page when we talk about “drive shaft” in the following section. On the other hand, we refer to what is known as “half shaft” internationally as “drive shaft” instead. The universal joint shaft is what we Malaysian would call a “long shaft” because of the length of the shaft. In Malaysia, we have our own local lingo. All of which are collectively known as drive shaft by international standard.īut these are NOT the drive shaft that we will be talking about today. If you Google the word “drive shaft”, you will see a lot of different pictures of (i) propeller shaft or (ii) Cardan shaft or even (iii) universal joint shaft. It’s a perfectly accurate definition but the only problem is that it is very broad definition. We’d like to clarify that.Īccording to Wikipedia, drive shaft is a mechanical component for transmitting torque and rotation. Original image by Panoha under CC BY-SA 3.0, and adapted by D S Auto.įirst and foremost, there seem to be some conflicting ideas about what is a “drive shaft”.
