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Comment by Nition | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is when I first started learning to drive, it seemed impossible to get right without stalling or bunny-hopping or something else going wrong. Yet now after years of driving it feels like there's a huge window of acceptable throttle and clutch. Apply tons or throttle or hardly any. Release the clutch carefully or quickly. Car always starts great. There must be so much muscle memory magic to it. I don't think I could bunny-hop the car anymore if I tried.

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Let's not forget modern cars have "throttle adaptations" and will automatically compensate for the driver's lack of throttle input. If you just release the clutch pedal slowly, the engine will rev itself enough not to stall and the car will start moving.

I've also noticed you can release all pedals while driving these days and instead of eventually slowing to a stall, the car will only slow until it's happily rolling along in gear at some sort of very slow minimum speed. I presume that's the same feature?

Pretty much any non-carbureted car should do that. All fuel injected cars have some mechanism for controlling idle, which involves some kind of valve bypassing the throttle (for mechanical throttle linkages) or just directly actuating the throttle blades (for drive-by-wire systems). There should be enough travel in the idle circuit to allow a tiny opening to keep idle low enough once the engine is warm, and a large enough opening to keep idle high enough to prevent stalling when the transmission is engaged.

Release the clutches linearly in half a second with the engine at 1k rpm and bunny hop away lol

But you’re totally right. You can pull away quickly by letting your rpm build up and choosing an aggressive clutch position while applying enough throttle to keep the rpm constant, alternatively in most cars you can pull away on a fairly steep hill with no throttle if you just barely let the clutch engage and hold it at that point until the car is moving steadily

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