I recall when my cousin taught his little sister how to drive a stick about 8 years ago.
They were in his Ranger, driving (or trying to drive) along the country roads, and she kept stalling out whenever she tried taking off from a stop. After nearly an hour of this, my cousin grabbed her by the shirt and screamed in her face, “Just drive the damn thing like you mean it!”
She dumped the clutch, slammed on the gas and took off like she had been doing it her whole life.
I think that the best car to use for learning to drive a stick shift is a 1946-52 Dodge Fluid Drive. These cars had a fluid coupling between the engine and the clutch so that the car was almost impossible to stall. After the clutch was a conventional three speed transmission. There was another version with a semi-automatic “lift and clunk” transmission that started off in a lower gear and shifted into high when one released the accelerator. These cars also had a clutch, but I think that the fluid coupling with the 3 speed manual transmission was the best for learning the clutch and shift. There were even some Dodge pick-up trucks and delivery vans with the fluid coupling. The downside was that there was some slippage in the fluid coupling. The other downside is that there aren’t that many of these Dodges around any more.
I agree!
I learned to drive stick in college when me and a couple of buddies rented a 24 foot truck from a well known truck rental company to move our meager belongings. At that size, automatics were not an option and one my friends knew how to drive stick.
After our move (which used like, 1/4 of the space in the truck), he took me to one of the empty parking lots at our college. It was a great vehicle to learn on, as it had a strong clutch, a low 1st gear, and most of all, we really didn’t care about the transmission! In no time at all I was shifting. I got a brief chance to drive on the road, but when it came time to return the vehicle he drove it as his name was on the rental agreement.
The funniest part was we got lost on the way back to the store and ended up on streets a bit small for a 24-foot truck. My buddy ended up knocking over a fire hydrant attempting to navigate a tight right turn! Unfortunately, they don’t spray up in the air like they show in movies…
So, my recommendation to would be shifters that can’t find a “donor” vehicle is to rent a truck for a day! It won’t cost too much, and they are built for abuse! Just stay away from fire hydrants…
Driving Commercial trucks is even more entertaining. More shift patterns, double clutching, etc… . My least favorite is the Mack 7 speed ( 2 low then 5 high), favorite seems to be Eaton 8 with LL. If you have drive the mack 7, you know why.
Practice starting on level ground W/o using the accelerator…it can be done and when accomplished will give you the correct feel of clutch engagement. Also, once mastered, practice shifting driving around in a cemetery, with low speed gear changes and no complaints from the residents. These techniques worked for two teenagers and a wife driving the same car for 250K miles and the original clutch on an 86 Chevy Nova. They will work for you.
A couple of things:
(1) It should be pointed out that the lady grabbing the shift lever in your cartoon should serve as a model of how NOT to use the lever. The shift lever should be gently nudged forward with the heel of the hand, and gently pulled backward with the fingers.
(2) When parking against a curb on a hill, the wheels should always be turned toward the curb regardless of whether the car is pointed up-hill or down-hill. If the car is parked on the right and facing up-hill, and the wheels are turned AWAY from the curb, there is a chance that if it begins to roll backward it might actually be a little too far from the curb for the tires to grab, and the car will roll into the middle of the street.
(3) More emphasis should be placed on down-shifting. It’s always easy to see when someone doesn’t really know how to properly drive a stick by asking 3 questions – (a) when do you down-shift?; (b) why do you down-shift?; and © how do you down-shift?
The answers are (a) you down-shift when the engine’s RPMs drop below the level where the engine operates without lugging, or to prepare for an immediate upcoming slower traffic condition such as going around a corner or entering a town after driving at a higher speed on the approaching highway; (b) to keep the engine in its comfort zone; and © you apply the brakes (if necessary) to slow the vehicle to the speed that you want to be going, depress the clutch, gently ease the gear lever OUT of the gear it has been in, rev the engine gently by depressing the gas pedal while the clutch is still depressed, then gently easing the gear lever IN to the new lower gear, and gently releasing the clutch while maintaining enough pressure on the gas to keep the car from either slowing more abruptly or accelerating abruptly – keeping the revs up and keeping the engine happy.
Now with commercial trucks( Mack, Petes, Internationals, etc…), down-shifting is done usually without clutch, just proper engine rpm. The same is true for up-shifting, the only real use of clutch is starting from stop. You can do this with almost any vehicle- car pick-up, even motorcycle, but NOT RECOMMENDED.
Ohhh!!! the memories! I remember, with great fondness, my father teaching me to drive a stick. He took me to a huge empty K-mart parking lot on a Sunday (yeah, back in the day stores were closed on Sunday). He looked me in the eye and said, “watch carefully”. He then proceeded to drive the car (a VW station wagon) around the parking lot slowly going through the forward gears . Then he put it in reverse and backed up and did the rolling in first with no gas thingy you’ve been talking about. He then switched places with me and made me engage the clutch and show him each and every shift position and when I had it smooth he said…“go, and remember you cannot get your license until you have mastered this”. By the end of the lesson, I had it down. He never stressed, he never made a face or raised his voice, as a matter of fact he barely said anything at all until finally he said “good job, now lets move on to the truck with the shift on the column”. Oh boy. There were other lessons, like making a smooth transition on a hill to first gear without freaking out, rolling backwards and hitting the car behind me or stalling, and of course the infamous parallel parking. I have never forgotten those lessons and I guess he did a good job because I feel comfortable driving just about anything and I can still hear his words in my head saying “if you can drive a stick, you can drive anything.” Go Dad!
My (younger) brother taught me to drive stick nearly 40 years ago when Dad
bought a manual transmission Pinto as the family car!
Rick took me to a school parking lot and explained the delicate balance of
releasing the clutch as I pressed down on the gas.Since I had been driving for several years neither of us thought it would be a big deal, but, I kept stalling out, so often that we finally traded places again to see if we could figure out what I was doing wrong.
Turned out, it was what I was not doing–Rick had overlooked mentioning the importance of
releasing the parking break when ready to put the car in motion, which was the first
thing he did when he got back into the driver’s seat. We both had an ‘ah-ha’ moment.
I can also attest to the usefulness of this knowledge as last summer I bought a 1994
Corolla wagon and got to the seller’s home to discover it was a stick shift. I hadn’t picked up that omission in the ad, but I test drove it and bought it that afternoon.
I love the car altho’ I think the previous owner was not as forthcoming as he had seemed
about the car’s mechanical fitness. I had to replace the clutch when I’d only put 3,000 miles on it and a month later the alternator went. I am hoping the timing belt will hold
on while I save up for it–taking your advice and wanting this car to last me for a long time.
I’ve always believed it’s easiest to learn how to do something if you can see the parts and how they work. If you work on cars and have a used clutch assembly in the scrap pile, show the student the pieces and what they do. Once they know what’s happening as they move their clutch foot, it’ll make a lot more sense. Otherwise, non-stickshift drivers think of the whole process as some kind of voodoo.
There is a wealth of information above about how to get started with a clutch and manual transmission. All of it is very good.
HOWEVER, no one mentioned the sin of ‘riding the clutch’. Once the new driver has learned how to get going without stalling the engine, it has to be emphasized that their foot must be removed completely from the clutch pedal between gears and on the open road! You have to explain the importance of the throwout bearing to them. (Tom and Ray call it a clutch release bearing, but that must be a regional variation.)
This will save them many expensive clutch overhauls in their lifetimes.
(I had the advantage of learning to drive back in the '60s on a '41 Buick with a Straight 8 engine. The long stroke gave it an incredible amount of low-speed torque, making it virtually impossible to stall. In first gear the car would go up a substantial incline while idling!! My father also taught my sister to drive, but on a later Buick with Dynaflow. In the 1980s she and her husband bought a VW van with four-on-the-floor. As a passenger one day I noticed she was riding the clutch. I pointed out that she needed to take her foot off the clutch pedal between shifts. She was grateful, having replaced the clutch once already, and now shifting gears always reminds her of me.)
I’ve been driving a stick (or manual) for almost forty years, but I have never seen anyone offer advice on how to deal with a slow crawling traffic jam. A few years back, I was stuck in New York city, moving ahead perhaps one block every five minutes. Sadly, this meant I had to depress the clutch frequently and inch ahead a few feet at best for what turned out to be about 15 blocks.
I knew my clutch had to be screaming in pain, but short of parking the car and waiting about five hours, I was clueless as best proceed.
Only at times like this did I ever consider an automatic transmission might actually have some virtue.
Hey, Tom and Ray, what would you recommend, if stuck along the Boston Harbor back when the Big Dig was going on?
Two things I heard ad nauseam from my father:
I’ll be using the same phrases with the accompanying intonation and volume changes as my patience wears thin with my three kids.
If you do not know of anyone who has a manual transmission vehicle, try contacting driving schools in your area and see if they offer stick shift instruction. Some states such as Minnesota where I live may not allow manual transmission lessons on public roads (you would have to ask around), so the alternative in that case is that they could teach you how to drive stick using a simulator.
Just an alternative I found out about.
Dan W.
[bragging]I once taught someone to drive a stick on the car they would be driving while house-sitting our house in twenty minutes just before we left on vacation. We also taught three kids who now all drive standards, and are married to, or about to marry, people who drive standards. I even taught someone, a fellow engineer mind you, on a blackboard, including how to bernstein without using the clutch, before we went out to the car.[/bragging]
As others have mentioned, starting from a stop is the hardest part, the rest is straightforward once that is mastered. Learning that involves learning three (or two and a half) skills and IMNSHO it works best by learning the three skills separately instead of trying to learn them all at once.
And the most important skill is (drum roll please) accelerator control!
Safety first! Start in a big empty parking lot. Always start each exercise with a lot of room in front so they can focus on the single skill they are learning. Once they can do this make sure they know to never look at their feet or the tachometer again.
Skill 1 is controlling engine speed with the accelerator. This is easiest to learn if there is a tachometer, but can be learned by ear (or maybe with an electronic tuner for musical instruments), and it will be done by ear eventually anyway. Ask the student (with the car in neutral!) to accelerate the engine to 2000rpm and hold it there. Then 3000rpm, 4000rpm, 1500rpm, &c. Most will start by overshooting and wandering all over the place but will eventually be able to change the engine speed from one point to another smoothly and quickly. The reason this is important is that with an automatic in gear the mass of the car greatly dampens the car’s response to throttle position and we never learn fine motor control of the gas.
Skill 2 is finding the friction point. The objective is to get the car moving without using the gas. Tell them they will do a quick version of this in every standard car they ever drive, and also that they should stop looking at their feet (you don’t watch your feet when you walk or run, do you?). Leave the car at idle and do not use the gas for this skill.
2.1) Depress the clutch.
2.2) Put the car in first gear.
2.3) Let the clutch up slowly until the engine speed drops a few hundred rpm (as measured by the tach) or about halfway to stalling (by ear) and then hold it there;
2.3.1) Do not touch the gas.
2.3.2) If (When;-) the car stalls DO NOT make a fuss no matter how many times it happens; tell them that is part of the learning process and just have them start again and let it up more slowly.
2.4) The car will start to move, and as the engine speed recovers continue bringing the clutch up slowly to keep the engine just below idle speed; this exercise is in one sense the inverse of Skill 1 above.
2.5) After a few seconds the clutch will be all the way up and the car will be moving at idle speed.
2.5.1) Now it is very important to stop watching the tach or the pedals and to start steering.
2.5.1) Now is a good time to mention proper standard driving includes removing your foot from the clutch pedal at all times except starting or shifting.
2.6) If it hasn’t happened yet make sure they let it up fast enough to buck and stall so they know what that feels like; have them try to get it to start to buck but then recover by depressing the clutch.
2.7) Repeat this step until it is easy for the student. Note that doing this at idle reduces the wear, per start, on the clutch.
2.8) For variation and understanding, try doing it in the higher gears (but not as much; this puts a bit more wear on the clutch).
Skill 3 is simply coordinating the timing between the previous two skills. It could also be thought of as balancing those skills to keep the engine speed more or less constant; the chosen control speed determines the speed of acceleration. Trying to do this without having the previous skills down pat only makes the learning process more frustrating and take longer.
Excuse me for making the case so pointedly, but my claim is that finishing the following two sentences is a rhetorical exercise:
If someone can’t control the engine speed in neutral with the clutch disengaged, then they can’t do it …
If someone can’t get the car moving smoothly in first gear without using the gas, then they can’t do it …
Btw, the comment about the car stalling and having your 16yo daughter give you the look she hasn’t for ten years brought tears to my eyes, and I consider it a valid, no, make that imperative, reason for not starting out using this method.
My dad had a 1951 or 1952 Chilton’s manual which had directions to take apart and rebuild just about every domestic car made to that point. He started by taking me through the photographs and diagrams of that book, including torque and power curves, describing how it all worked. He also had me help him change a clutch, which is a great exercise. When I drive, in my mind I am riding up and down torque curves.
I disagree; it’s more the coordination between the two but a well controlled gas pedal is the key to smooth starting and shifting. The mass of the car dampens the control response in an automatic so we never learn fine accelerator control.
Definitely. I posted a long detailed tome below after missing this post. Learn the skills separately (clutch without gas, gas without clutch) to save time.
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