Manual Cars

I’m going to teach you how to drive a manual car. First you have to actually get the car to start moving. Once you’ve got that down, you have to shift. And finally, you must be able to slow down and stop. After you have all that down, you have to try it in reverse.

When you sit down in a manual car and put the key into the ignition, you can’t just start it up. You have to make sure your left foot is on the clutch and your right foot on the break. You might be asking, “What’s the clutch?” The Websters’ Dictionary defines the clutch as “a pedal or lever that engages or disengages a rotating shaft and a driving mechanism;” this pedal is located left of the brake. Once the car is started you must check that the park brake is off. Now, here’s how to make your car move. You must make sure the clutch is pushed all the way down, and then move the stick from neutral into first gear. Here’s the difficult part: you must slowly raise the clutch while slowly pushing the acceleration to the floor. This can take a long time to get used to, it took me about two weeks to perfect it. I even had to sit at green lights because I was unable to get the car to move!

The next part of driving a stick shift is shifting. Once you have gotten out of first gear you can’t just go sixty mph. To know when to shift to the next gear you must look at the rpm. As www.dmv.org states in their explanation, you should shift at about 3,000 rpm’s, depending on each car. When you see the rpm dial at around 3,000 rpm’s you want to remove your foot from the acceleration, and push down the clutch. Then you can move the stick into the next gear, then remove your foot from the clutch and continue to accelerate.

The most important part of driving a car is braking. With a stick shift car there are two main ways to use the brake.