Only one EV charger at home?!

Also in 1963 in Indianapolis, where driver's ed was part of high school and offered to everyone, and taken by everyone.

I don't think they wanted the burden of teaching how to shift gears when they first had to teach how to steer.

I read about it in a book, and in 1968 when a friend wanted to start early on our trip, he took me out in his car and let me drive it. To go from Chicago to Pittsburgh, you only have to shift about 8 times, and then he drove.

Same here.

Ah. I didn't really process what 100% discount meant. There are three sporting goods stores within couple miles of each other, all in strip malls: Dick's, Dunham's, REI. None of them has excessive problems with crime. Most of the crime takes place on campus.

I live south of I-94 and east of US-23. There was no crime at all there this week, and next to none in the last month.

Correct. And a LOT more. I am not sure how many classes of vehicle there are today, but moped, motorcycle under 125cc. motorcycle, car manual, car automatic, vehicle over 3.5 tonnes , over 7.5 tonnes, HGV & PSV, spring to mind from erratic memory.

by totally I mean well beyond my ability to do anything more than slightly better than coast to a atop. The steering became unusable too.

Yes happened to me in stop start jam downhill on the M25 some years ago. Kept on braking with the car idling. Suddenly no brakes...

I am not sure but electric pumps instead of vacuum or engine driven ones are getting more common.

On a BEV you would have no other option for power assist

My father tried to teach my mother. Soon my mother decided she would go to a driving school, and admonished me to never let him teach me, nor me teach anyone :-D

Yeah, there was some incident where the car with them flew into an empty house lot. She confused brake with accelerator or something :-)

In the UK when I passed it could be either. In fact I did it in my mothers car. Which had partially seized brakes. The emergency stop nearly spun the car, s O took my foot of and straightened the car before pulling up a second later. "Top marks for car control" the inspector said "But you would have killed the hypothetical child" I retorted "the child was hypothetical, the skid was real"

He passed me. I had been driving on L plates for a year. Every chance I got

I am not sure what the current EU mandated legality is in the UK, (we haven't changed any of it since we left) but when I learnt to drive in the 1960s there was no requirement to take even a single lesson. Many people who learn to drive during WWII never had to take a test either. All you did was present yourself at a test centre with a car. The inspector jumped in and off you went.

I had a start-stop Corsa (you know, they stop the engine when the car stops moving or nearly so, and start it automatically as you foot the clutch). The brake did work with the motor stopped, and the steering assist. The later I know was electric and would keep running from the battery.

The book said the motor could start again if the steering or brakes were used too much in that state.

Easily done. My sister on executing a left turn, which she managed to do, was told to 'straighten up'. She didn't know what that meant and continued turning left into a ditch.

People should star in go karts till they learn how to steer and brake and control the car. Then Tesco's car park on Sunday to learn how to reverse and be accurate and use the gears and clutch

THEN they are moderately safe on the road and can begin to learn the real art of driving - avoiding all the other assholes. And the trees. And the speed cameras And the speed humps And the chicanes.

I would think of that as coasting. OK it's not coasting in the sense of opening the clutch so the wheels are free to turn undriven, but the engine is not applying very much retardation force. For example, on the motorway going downhill in top gear, the car still gathers speed even if you let off the accelerator. Not as much as if you opened the clutch, but it still wouldn't decrease your speed. Whereas a sufficient application of the brakes would.

In that situation, you'd get more engine braking if you changed down (it would try to rev the engine faster) but it wouldn't be good for the engine.

Theo

Do you mean hydraulic but not power assisted? The hydraulics have a different "gearing" (I don't know the proper word) so the force you have to apply is still reasonable. I had a Mk I Escort like that. It had drum brakes all round too. OK, but if you went through a puddle (or just drove it in heavy rain) water would get into the drums and I would have to go along with my left foot on the brake pedal to dry it out.

My husband taught himself to drive stick shift by test driving cars with manual transmissions. I'm pretty sure he'd seen someone drive stick shift, and he's a "see one, do one, teach one" kind of guy.

It's considered bad form for residents of one country to stereotype and mock residents of another country. We are all different and learn to do things differently.

But...

A work colleague was telling me of an incident that his father had witnessed when he worked for a car-rental company at an airport. A brash, over-confident American (and I'm sure that not all Americans are like this!) wanted to rent a car. My friend's dad offered him an automatic, reasoning that far fewer Americans than Europeans have ever driven a manual.

The American was confident that he could handle a manual - "how hard can it be: I'll manage". And so he was led to a manual car that was parked in a line of cars alongside the kerb.

He revved up the engine (he'd heard how easy it is to stall a manual if you haven't developed the clutch-control muscle-memory) and let the clutch in smartly. This caused him to rocket forward into the car ahead, pushing that car into the one ahead of it. Before the car-hire guy could intervene, the American had put the car into reverse and done the same thing to the cars behind, as he tried to extricate himself. Within the space of about 10 seconds he had just written-off five cars :-(

Moral: know you limitations and be cautious. It's not a sin to admit that you don't have the confidence to drive a manual car.

It's not just to be awkward that UK drivers who passed their test on an automatic car are not *allowed* to drive a manual car. I'm not sure whether an "automatic licence" acts as a provisional licence for a manual car. In other words, does it allow a driver who has never driven a manual to drive one as long as he is accompanied by a driver who holds a full licence but is not qualified to *teach* someone to drive?

What is the situation with drivers who only hold foreign driving licences when they drive a British (hire) car? Are those deemed to be full "manual" licences (ie allowed to drive manual as well as automatic)? Is it left to the driver to say "Can I have an automatic because I'm not used to driving manual?"

I'm not sure how well I'd have be able to teach myself to drive a manual car if I hadn't had a qualified teacher to give me feedback and advice, to get me past the stage of repeatedly making the same mistakes and never learning how to cure them. There is a lot to be said for driving instructors teaching learners the basics of clutch control off-road (eg in a deserted car park or something similar) so they are reasonably competent in controlling the car, changing directly from any gear to any gear without stalling or lurching forward, and recognising the signs when you need to change down *before* you stall.

I've driven a fair number of cars, manual and automatic, petrol and diesel. I hate automatics because they change gear at a time when I wouldn't: I like to be able to control the timing of gearchanges so they happen just before I start to apply power (so I accelerate all in the same gear and acceleration is proportional to throttle position all the time I'm in that gear). During acceleration, I time the gear change to a time when I come off the power briefly. I wouldn't drive an automatic out of choice, but I can do - I have to drive more gently so as not to be caught out by "uncommanded" gearchanges, especially when accelerating out of a roundabout and it's a toss-up between not enough acceleration in one gear and s*it-hot acceleration in a much lower gear; the option of "stay in this gear and let me apply slightly more power" doesn't exist.

The only car that I just could not get to grips with was a diesel VW Golf. Not sure which Mark but it had the older Pumpe Duse engine rather than the present HDi-type engine. I'm used to driving diesels, and I know that it is difficult to stall them: at worst then engine will just labour a bit and fail to accelerate. Even petrols do this, though the point at which they start to labour may be at a higher engine speed so they are a bit less forgiving.

This car was different. There was something about it (maybe some weird programming in the engine-management system) that meant that if you didn't apply quite enough power, the engine would stall completely as if the fuel had been cut off (*). No warning signs to give you chance to apply slightly more power, to dip the clutch slightly or to change down. Just a toddler's approach of throwing its toys out of the pram if you didn't get it right. Despite being used to driving diesels, I've never stalled a petrol engined car. But I repeatedly stalled that diesel VW at almost every time where I had to set off from rest. And it wasn't just that car that was badly-adjusted. I tried another one with the same engine a while later to see if it was as bad as I remembered. The sales assistant said the almost everyone stalls that engine until they get used to it. Not a very good advert for the car ;-)

I chose another car instead.

(*) A sort of "you've not applied enough power so I'm going to make damn certain that I cut the fuel off to force you to stall - then you'll get the message that you've cocked up".

I have a VW Golf MKVII and this one is diesel but with a 6 speed DSG gearbox.

The DSG box can be driven either in automatic or manual mode.

In automatic mode, it has two clutches, one for even gears and the other for odd gears, It can change gear in less than 100 mS and it will change down a gear if you put pedl to metal for overtaking.

There is a driving profile button for selecting economy mode all the eay up to Sports mode.

To put in Manual, push the gear stick to the left and it then becomes a manual paddle shift manual box.... There is no clutch pedal at all, just move the gearstick up or down and the gearbox changes gear for you.

I think you would have got on better with this hybrid gearbox....

As long as you don't over-rev the engine it's not a problem. Dump it from

The high school I went to had a driver ed course but I was too young to enroll. You had to be 16 to get a lerner's permit so my father taught me to drive. After several thousand miles on roads ranging from dirt to the Thruway the final test was a trip to the World's Fair in NYC to see how I did in big city traffic. Then he declared I was ready to take the formal test.

In a role reversal my mother taught her father to drive. She was in the back seat when he took his first test, trying a little telepathy: "release the handbrake. release the handbrake'. He didn't, stalled the engine and failed. The next time went better.

Unless you were too young during your high school years... On ther plus side I didn't have to watch the gory movie that was part of the course.