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Comment by Fezzik | Hacker News Reader

That bums me out, but I get it. My first non hand-me-down car was a beat-up Audi A4 (manual) off craigslist that I loved for years and years as a ski bum. I am definitely one of the many "manual transmissions are more fun" people. But once I got that office job, even 15 minutes a day in city traffic with a manual angered me, so I transitioned to an automatic. Now that I am out of the city I would love a manual again, but when most people live in big cities with traffic issues, and drive to and from work every day, it makes sense that manuals are not that popular in the states.

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I found that having a stick in traffic was actually easier for me. I could keep it in one gear which meant not moving my foot from brake to gas (I could just use engine breaking and use just the gas).

This is dangerous, as you aren't signaling people behind you if you are braking...

Edit: I would likely soften the "dangerous" wording above. I'm not trying to claim this is guaranteed to get you killed. Just pointing out that bypassing a well established signaling mechanism of your vehicle should be a deliberate act. Not one of convenience.

Engine breaking just means slowing down by letting the foot off the gas. You aren't really slowing down that quickly. Someone has to really not be paying attention to miss it. It would be the equivalent of someone merging.

I know what it means. And I've seen some folks do it fast enough to catch followers by surprise. Especially at night.

To that point, I'm not trying to claim it is insurmountably dangerous. It is more dangerous that just using the brakes, though.

Yep, one of my favorite ways to mess with tailgaters was to drop a gear or two and drop the clutch. *of course not recommending anyone ever do this since it's dangerous as hell.

Idea: have the brakes come on when the car decelerates independent of whether or not the brakes are engaged. Simple a sensor that detects deceleration in excess of 'X' Gs will enable the brake lights.

These exist, for example:

https://gearbrake.com/collections/shop/products/gearbrake-sm...

Some electrics do that because the regeneration system makes them lose a lot of speed quickly so they automatically turn them on.

I agree, but you actually can slow down relatively quickly at stop-and-go speeds if you have some RPM on a big V8 and you take your foot off the gas. Certainly I try to remember that, because I tend to avoid using the brake pedal except when strictly necessary. I've seen some people behind me act kinda surprised that I can slow down without activating the lights. Yes they should be watching my car, not my lights, but this is the real world.

>Engine breaking just means slowing down by letting the foot off the gas.

Given how often I've driven on stretches of road where engine braking is prohibited, I beg to differ.

Engine braking is usually braking by shifting to a lower gear.

I will chime into that, though, that they are prohibiting large trucks from doing it. They don't care about cars doing it. (The wikipedia page explains the difference and why some places prohibit trucks from doing it.)

Edit: That said, I fully agree that most times I hear folks talk of engine braking, they mean shifting down to slow somewhat faster than just coasting.

In my experience, places where engine braking is prohibited tend to be with the intent to reduce engine braking by tractor trailers or other large apparatuses, which can be very loud. In much of the U.S, posted signage prohibits "Jake braking" which specifically targets tractor trailers and other large trucks. [0]

[0]: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/96447/why-prohibi...

Engine braking is prohibited due noise from large diesels using compression brakes aka "jake brakes" - specialised engine braking hardware. They make engine braking much more effective, so that trucks can slow down more without heating the regular brakes as much, but they can be loud.

The parent is essentially right; engine braking is using the engine to slow the vehicle down.

That can happen with a automatic transmission as well. You should not rely on the "brake lights" to realize that the car in front of you is slowing down or stopped.

Agreed.

In particular, I agree with both points that "you should signal folks behind you that you are slowing down" and "you should pay attention to how fast the car in front of you is going." Neither point diminishes the other.

I've wondered how this is issue is addressed in EVs that offer one-pedal driving. Do they show the brake lights when deceleration exceeds a certain rate?

Similarly, when I'm braking very lightly in my plugin-in hybrid in order to charge the battery all the way down a long hill, I wish there were a way to not have the brake lights activated the whole time. It's only barely slowing me down, and I've driven other cars that decelerated more going down the same hill just due to wind drag and rolling resistance.

I'm curious why you care about the brake lights being on if you are actually braking. Even only slightly.

Though, to directly answer your question, I don't know how cars that only have a single pedal work with this. Embarrassingly, I didn't realize those existed, so would be as interested as you in the answer.

It's not that the cars have one pedal, it's that you can get by with one pedal as lifting off the accelerator will induce the regenerative braking and slow the car down. On the Tesla at least this is an optional feature since it can be jarring to people who haven't used it.

Since engine braking is an extremely common way for motorcycles to reduce speed, there are any number of aftermarket products that are essentially an accelerometer inline with the brake light, which will turn on or flash the brake light when sudden deceleration is detected.

I can see no reason why this wouldn’t work equally well for cars.

I was curious on this, so quickly checked a search. Some quora answers indicated it is a matter of regulation. General feel I got was it was expected to change with newer vehicles, but inertia in the current way things are certified will be a barrier.

Federal regulation requires brake lights to be on if deceleration from regenerative braking to be over specified thresholds.

edit: apparently, it's UN regulation, not federal.

Cool to know. Do you have up to date links to that regulation?

See below link for references to relevant regulation.

https://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/traffic/rules-of-the-r...

Not really; it's pretty much impossible to stop suddenly via engine braking alone in a stick shift without forcing the transmission into a much lower gear (fourth to second or first, for example) and engaging the clutch, which will damage the drivetrain if done more than a few times. Engine braking, if done correctly, is a gradual slowdown with the ability to immediately accelerate again, all without wearing on your brakes, and once it's learned it becomes a natural part of driving a manual. If someone is following you close enough to hit you while you gradually slow down, tail lights or not, that's their fault for tailgating.

That said, engine braking isn't appropriate in all situations; I personally wouldn't do it in heavy stop-and-go traffic, but for highway and around-town driving it's perfectly safe. I definitely wouldn't do it with a tailgater behind me, just out of common sense.

Your last sentence pretty much puts us in agreement. I will add an edit that says I am not trying to say never consider engine braking. Just realize that cars can get behind you quite quickly without you realizing it, and not signaling that you are stopping is dangerous.

I have the same problem on my bike. I don't always signal when I'm about to stop at a corner, and have had folks near hit me for it. (Granted, if you are stopping on a bike, it is literally harder to signal that you are stopping. Point stands that if I could, it would be safer.)

> Just realize that cars can get behind you quite quickly without you realizing it, and not signaling that you are stopping is dangerous.

One can always use hand signals too; that was something I was taught when I first learned to drive. Open hand out the window pointed up for a right turn, pointed straight for a left turn, and pointed down at the ground for slowing/stopping.

Of course that was 25 years ago; I wonder if hand signals are even still taught in driving schools.

I'm a biker, so hand signaling is most of what I do. Though, much easier said than done. And, most people in cars are highly focused on key features. The brake light in front of them being one of them.

Engine braking is a pretty gradual deceleration - if the car behind you doesn't notice that you're slowing down in the ~30 seconds it takes to close a safe distance with a car that's gradually slowing down, you got bigger problems. For that matter, automatics do it too. Take your foot off the gas in an automatic and wind/rolling resistance will eventually slow you down too.

I find that the fuel economy savings from engine breaking are largely a matter of incentives. You can drive the same way in an automatic, and you will get nearly the same fuel economy savings. You're just not incentivized to do so, since the break/gas dance is much easier in an automatic and you don't have the cognitive feedback of needing to shift gears each time you accelerate or decelerate.

Most people I know that refer to engine braking have always meant something faster than an automatic would do. Unless you are talking about letting of the gas and downshifting in an automatic.

Is it guaranteed to get you in a wreck? Not at all. But, I would be surprised if people weren't more keyed to the "red light" in front of them than you are letting on.

More blame should be assigned for being dangerous to the person who only glances up from his phone when he sees red lights than to the engine braker.

This implies I was giving less blame to those folks. I'm not taking away any responsibility from anyone for dangerous behavior. However, especially with how highly visible lights are on modern vehicles, it is silly to not realize any situation that at all inhibits visibility will benefit from extra signaling.

As I said down thread, I think I can logically and in full conscious support both of those statements. :)

So, yes, folks that are being negligent deserve the blame in wrecks they cause. However, signaling benefits everyone. Including folks driving in fog/rain/night/whatever.

Being able to assign the blame elsewhere is cold comfort when you've been in an auto accident.

To be fair, engine braking is quicker deceleration than an automatic does, a modern automatic will freewheel the transmission when coasting.

One of the first things i notice when driving an automatic that scares me the most is that it doesn't stop.

Thankfully electric cars are bringing this back. And i think studies are showing its safer.

>This is dangerous, as you aren't signaling people behind you if you are braking...

Engine braking results in a slow drop in speed. If the car behind you cannot handle a slow speed decline, he is the problem, and is driving too close to you.

Most good instructors teach students to try to slow down as much as possible just by getting your foot off the accelerator (not with engine braking, and not with real brakes).

As in don't wait till you are near the stop light to apply the brakes - just get your foot off the gas much earlier, and apply the brakes when you have to. In real terms, when driving at 45mph, I usually don't need to apply the brakes until I'm at 35 or 30mph. Puts less load on the brakes, and is supposed to be safer - you are easing into a lower speed as opposed to doing it suddenly.

The people behind you will not see a brake light, but will still slow down behind you. If they hit you, they are driving poorly.

As I said up thread, there is usually a big difference in what folks refer to as engine braking and coasting a bit. In particular, my stick shift will slow dramatically faster when I engine brake in first/second compared to what will happen in any automatic I've ever driven. (In particular, it is entirely possible for me to completely engine brake to a stop sign. That is considerably more than just coasting to a stop.)

Also as I said, though, I should have been a bit softer there. I'm not saying it will get you in trouble guaranteed. But, just as I agree it is more dangerous to ride a bike without a helmet, I recommend against not signaling folks behind you that you are stopping.

And, also as I mentioned up thread. If someone hits you because they didn't see you stopping, yes, it is their fault. I don't exactly care who is at fault in many ways, if I'm hit. I'd just as soon not get hit. :)

Coasting in first is a rarity. Requires a really big downshift (with intense rev matching - older cars with less of a 1st synchro left will even require double clutching) or you to be in high rpms to start

Are you not still using the clutch when you come to a stop?

I did, but as long as traffic doesn't come to a complete stop it wasn't often necessary. Also, that's the other foot, so it doesn't have to move either. :)

Can't you do the same thing in an automatic? Put it in first gear?

You can.

Sure, but I was just saying that to me moderate traffic didn't bother me when I had a stick, as was OPs complaint.

Just get an electric vehicle or hybrid, and drive in B or L. Same thing, no clutch

I learned to drive in a manual. Now that my son is getting close to driving age, I wanted to teach him in a manual first, like I learned - and then I found out it's damned near impossible to _find_ one any more.

I confess I gained a ton of respect for Klik & Klack was when they gave the advice to not teach kids on a stick shift.

This is akin to teaching a kid to ride a 21 speed bike. They can probably get up to that rather quickly, all told, but just learning the basics of balance and pedaling will already be difficult enough.

Similarly, just learning the basics of the car will already be tough. Why add to it? Why not take away power steering? Because it would make it harder.

Agreed. I learned on an automatic at 15 and then "upgraded" on my own to a manual in my 20s because I wanted one. Adding in a manual transmission makes driving non-trivially harder. Just learning the basics of not hitting things, merging, keeping an eye out for traffic, signaling, etc., is hard enough for beginners.

I'm not sure it's really that big a deal. My dad taught me to drive by going out to a lonely national park with a lot of parking lots and letting me figure it out. On an automatic, yes. 20 minutes later he said, okay, good, now drive us home. And I did. Driving isn't that magic. So I will probably teach my kids how to drive our pickup first, and then for laughs we will take my 455 horsepower Camaro out to learn how a manual works. And then they will not be driving it much after, hahahaha...

Driving is one of those things that most of us probably have no clue how everyone else actually thinks about and does it.

To that end, I just don't know. I expect I will have an issue teaching my children. Biking has already thrown me some curve balls. Nothing insurmountable. But the more you have on the bike, the harder it is for the learner to get it going.

I mean, I hate biking without my shoes that attach to the pedal nowdays. I would not at all attempt to teach my kids on such a bike for a while.

Oh man, I remember how long it took me to learn to ride a bike. Quite a lot longer than driving a car, I'm afraid. Learning that you have to turn one way, fall, and turn the other way is definitely counterintuitive and requires your brain to do some rewiring.

I also hate attaching my feet to the pedals. I do not want to confess that I've hit the ground in a very undignified manner more than once because I couldn't get my feet unclipped in time :(

Falling down is no big deal and expected. Why you should always weara helmet. My favorite is wheni released my left foot, but leaned right. Did that twice.

Nowadays, i feel more stable clipped in.

And i know countersteering is a thing. Don't really process it, though.

455HP in the hands of an inexperienced teenager (who will inevitably believe he is a far better driver than he actually is) is a recipe for disaster.

The shop that built my engine told me they wouldn't have done it if I was under 40.

As I said ... we will go learn to drive the monster, and then they will not really get many opportunities after that. Show some responsibility and I may let them drive it some more with me in the car, but it will be some time before I trust them to have unlimited access to a high performance car.

Though to be fair, the latest iteration of the stability and traction control is pretty amazing. Short of turning it off, or driving with inappropriate tires for conditions, I can't really get the car out of shape without turning off the nannies. I can hang it out a bit but I could never manage to pull off those beautiful crowd-killing losses of control that Mustangs seem to apt to pull at Cars & Coffee events around the country.

So aside from just driving too fast and making physics an insurmountable issue, they could probably drive it pretty safely if I somehow made it so the nannies could not be disabled.

I drove one way with my dad in the car, another way when he wasn't. Suffice to say I'm lucky to have survived intact into adulthood.

I haven't driven a nanny car and don't know what they're like. They should have a "teenager" mode which detunes it to 100HP :-)

The latest iterations of stability control have gotten quite good. I can drive my '18 1LE like a jerk, in the rain, on twisty roads and other than the flashing of the warning light it's not really intrusive, it just keeps me from going sideways. Quite remarkable how well they've dialed it in. Once in a while it does kill the fun too abruptly, but mostly it just makes you think the car has vastly more traction than it does.

I think I started learning manual transmissions when I was about 8 years old, riding with my father. He'd pick less busy stretches of road and tell me I had to shift for him, while he operated the clutch. At first, he told me what gear to move to next, then started to just say "shift" and expect me to have figured out we need to upshift or downshift, and eventually he would just warn me I was on duty and then expect me to anticipate and synchronize with his pedal actions without further voice signals.

When I was tall enough, he'd have me move his car around on our long driveway so I learned to feather the clutch for start/stop maneuvers in first gear. By the time I was getting my learner's permit and hitting the road for the first time, I already had the theory and practice for the drive-train and could focus on the more important traffic rules and vigilance.

I still remember his "graduation" test for me, which was taking me on a ride to a nearby very steep hill and parallel parking. Then, he gave me the keys and said very sincerely that I needed to pull out, drive around the neighborhood, return, and park back in the same spot without burning the clutch and without stalling the engine...

With you there. My '68 Camaro, small-block, and requisite Muncie 4-speed. Can't imagine it any other way.

Driving isn't that magic.

Driving is easy. Interacting safely with the other people on the road is what is hard.

When I was learning to drive my parents taught me in an old early 80's beat up station wagon. It was manual and had no power steering and the worst clutch I've ever used to this day. It took me a long time to learn to drive.

A few years later they sold the car and both my sisters learnt to drive in more modern automatics.

My learning experience was miserable but after learning in that old crappy wagon I can drive just about anything now. Once you have parked a car without power steering any other parking you have to do in a modern car feels like a complete non issue.

Would you teach someone on a vehicle without power steering? :)

Our truck has bad power steering. Such that it often handles as if it didn't have it. Holy crap is that a pain.

I definitely would not recommend. Manual I think is ok to learn but I'd insist on power steering and modern safety features.

I own a manual currently. One big disadvantage (or possibly an advantage...) is when Friends ask to borrow car you need to ask "Can you drive a manual?" 9/10 times I've found answer is no.

That's because the steering wheel gears are different in a car made for manual steering than one made for power steering. The manual steering wheel has quite a bit more leverage.

I drive a manual steered car. It's no problem at all. It's more physical than fingertip control, sure, but I like that. You can feel the road better.

I taught my daughter using a car that had no power steering. But it was a Nissan Micra, so it was still physically possible for her to turn the steering wheel while the car was parked...

Geez, I learned to drive on a stick, so did a hundred million other people. It's no travesty.

And I learned a lot of things without modern tools. Doesn't mean I was better for it. Or that I didn't make more mistakes than I might have, had I been given better tools.

Just look up survivor bias sometime. It is a thing. This is an common refrain of it.

> Why not take away power steering? Because it would make it harder.

What? Have you even driven anything that's not a big truck without power steering (and I don't mean a car with power steering disabled). It's not _that_ big a difference, if at all.

Have you seen a 16 year old try? Many failures are an adding up of a bunch of "not a big difference" differences. Why take that risk?

You would clearly stop short of taking away vision. Why not make people drive with a vehicle that doesn't have a rear window? All told, shouldn't be that big of a deal. That said, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/02/backup-... was a headline story for a reason.

I had a mini for a year or two; one of the little ones that would just about fit inside the back of that BMW thing they call a "mini" now. I could see how it could surprise someone who's learning to drive, or isn't used to a car without power steering - the wheel is substantially harder to turn when the car isn't rolling.

Same. I bought a Tacoma a couple of years ago, and while there was technically a manual option available, nobody actually had one, or could tell me when I could get one.

We have a 2012 Manual V6 Tacoma; it was what sold me on it as its getting rare to find them. The dealer told me since Generation 2 only 5% of Tacomas (1 in 20) are manual.

I find people who learned how to drive manual to be better drivers - they tend to think ahead which is understandable. One does not really want to shift just to jump ahead of one car to see that there's nowhere to go. It is too bad that fewer and fewer people have this skill.

It definitely makes you look a little farther ahead to plan your moves so you don't have to constantly keep working the clutch to move forward another couple feet like folks with automatics do.

I hypothesize that outlawing the automatic transmission would have an amazing effect on traffic. If everybody is driving a manual then there will be more foresight; and at the least you're probably reducing the driving pool by 10%

Yea, traffic sucks, and I think traffic is eventually going to push people to adopt cars with dynamic radar cruise control systems (that support stop-and-go traffic / low-speed follow). I have such a car (the Toyota Prius Prime), and driving any other regular car in heavy traffic has become insufferable.

I have one of those too but I find that it's only useful in light traffic. Anything more and it likes to slam on the brakes anytime someone merges into the lane. They still need to work on that software a bit.

BMW's latest rev of this tech (they call it 'active cruise control') has an adjustable sensitivity for brake response. Default setting is very good; it only slams on the brakes if it absolutely has to, otherwise it's a gradual response. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

" ... so I transitioned to an automatic"

Clever.

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