5 Things You Should Never Do In A Manual Transmission Vehicle!

What's up, everybody? So in today's video, we're going to go over five things that you have got to stop doing in your manual transmission vehicle, things you just should not do in a car with a stick shift. Real quick, we have bros for feet decals. Check out the description below. We only ordered 80 of them to begin with, so hurry up and get them while we still have some. Number one on the list, when you come up to a stoplight and you're on some type of incline, rather than actually using your brakes in your car to make it to where you're not moving, do not feather the clutch on the gas, off the gas, and just roll forward and back. What that's doing is actually causing excessive wear on your clutch. It's just slipping your clutch itself going from on and off. It's actually putting more pressure on the clutch spring with the throwout bearing, and you look kind of stupid. When I was 16, my first car had a stick shift in it. I thought I was super cool whenever I was on a hill rocking back and forth. In my opinion, everybody around me was looking at me thinking, that guy is so cool, he's in a stick shift car. In reality, I looked like an idiot and nobody cared. Nobody who wasn't a car enthusiast was looking, and all the car enthusiasts that would have seen me doing that, they would have just been saying, that guy is just wearing out his clutch. So when you're at a stoplight on a hill, use the brake. That is what they are intended to do. The brakes do a very good job keeping a car from not moving. Use your brake to hold yourself, and then when the traffic starts moving, then you may start and accelerate and move, but rocking back and forth, you're just wearing out your clutch and you look kind of dumb. And point number two on the list, when you come up to a complete stop, leave it in neutral. Leave your foot on the brake to hold yourself. You do not need to keep the clutch in and keep it in gear the entire duration of the stoplight. All that's doing is putting excessive wear on your clutch pedal, your throat bearing is on the clutch spring. Holding it open, you're basically holding it expanded, wanting to engage, but you're holding it out. That's putting more stress than is needed. There's really no point to do that. Keep your right foot on the brake to hold yourself at a standstill. Keep it in neutral. Keep your foot off the clutch. Once the traffic starts moving, then go ahead, put it back into gear and start moving. Now, if you are at a stop sign, you know you're going to be stopped for just a few seconds, you can leave it in gear, make sure it's safe, and then proceed. But if you're going to be there at any length of time, just leave it in neutral and foot on the brake. Number three on the list, this is more of a comfort issue, the shifter is not a hand rest and your clutch pedal is not a foot rest. When you're cruising in your car, don't get in the habit of just leaving your hand on the shifter and resting your foot against the actual clutch pedal. This is bad for a few reasons. With this shifter, you have to think about this more of the inside of the transmission rather than an interior decorative piece. This shifter is actually connected to the inside of the transmission and putting any type of pressure on it in any direction is actually pushing it against the gearing in the vehicle and you're basically pushing a stationary object against something that is spinning and that's causing excessive wear. When you're making an actual shift in the car, it's a very quick duration of the shifter pushing the collar against the synchro into the gears to make an actual gear change. So if you're just putting a little pressure on there by holding it some way, shape or form, you're just putting excessive wear on it and you don't need to do that. So with the clutch pedal, kind of the same thing. When you have your foot on it slightly, two things can actually be happening right there. You might be putting enough pressure on the clutch to actually be opening it up just a little bit and making the actual clutch disc slip a little bit. So you're just slipping your clutch and wearing it out prematurely. You don't need to do that. There's no point to do that. You're just harming your vehicle. And on top of that, putting a little bit of pressure there is putting the throwout bearing onto the clutch spring. And again, that's excessive wear and you just don't need to do any of that. Next up on the list, when you're downshifting, get in the habit of doing some sort of rev matching. I've ridden with a lot of people who, whenever they downshift, they don't even think to rev match. So right now at 2,000 RPM in fourth gear, if I go to third gear, the RPM needs to be higher. A lot of people, they push in the clutch. The car is now at idling right now. It's at 750 RPM. If I hurry up and dump the clutch, the car jerks. The clutch is having to slip a lot to now match the engine speed to the actual vehicle speed. And just like with the other points, that's causing excessive wear on the clutch. It makes it a jerky downshift and it's just not a proper way to drive a stick shift. Rev matching is a very important thing when driving one of these cars. Whenever you're making a downshift, you want to blip it just a little bit. That way it's a very smooth transition and when you're not doing that, it's a jerky drive. You don't look like you can drive a manual very well. It's causing more wear on the clutch pedal than needed and just, it's not the right way to drive one of these cars. Now last up on the list, this doesn't even involve driving the car, but when you end up coming to a stop and parking your car, don't get in the habit of leaving it in neutral with your e-brake off. Now you might think a 3,000 pound vehicle is hard to push, but actually anybody can push a car in neutral. It's really easy and you never know, you could be parked somewhere, someone could even bump up against your car and it could start rolling down a hill if that flat surface you thought you parked on isn't as flat as you thought, so leaving it in neutral like that, anything could happen to where your car could then roll into a person or an object or something to cause damage and you really don't want to have to deal with that. Always leave it in gear, either do first gear or reverse, keep the e-brake engaged, safely park your vehicle like that, and that's the best way to park. Now in case you thought that was reckless, that was a controlled experiment, so don't worry, the car was in no danger, although it was in neutral rolling, so yeah, it could have been bad, but it goes uphill, so we're all good. Well everybody, those are five things you should not be doing in a manual transmission vehicle. These cars are awesome for many reasons and one of them is the fact that you control the transmission, you have so much more control over how the vehicle operates. It is a blast to drive, it's a fun skill, but if you do it wrong, you can cause damage on your vehicle and that's just not a fun thing to do. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video, be sure to give it a huge thumbs up, smash the subscribe button, stay tuned for plenty more videos to come. We'll see you all next video.