Only one EV charger at home?!

Lovely lady I met was talking about curry - 'Ring Sting' was the phrase.

Presumably you're still using the brakes though? eg if you're driving at speed on the motorway and the tail lights come on in front of you, you're not reaching for the gear stick to change down instead of braking?

Theo

A friend tried "Engine breaking" at speed on the M1 for that reason. The engine broke.

My brakes last over 100000 Km. I barely use them. The clutch lasts over

Oh, that dish washing machine did a heck of a rack when it was new. My father got it in the late 70's, I think.

The test is done in the driving school car, and all of them I have seen are manual shift.

You could use another car, but it has to be fitted with pedals on the other seat.

I don't know how those particular tests are done. My guess is, it is provided by the driving school as well.

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Not unless your brakes are US, no.

I vividly remember using the engine and handbrake to avoid the people who were overtaking me and slamming their brakes on when my master cylinder hydraulic line fractured

Here, gasoline is very expensive. 1.7€ a litre. A lot of that are taxes. Due to that, our cars tend to be small, and designed to drink little. An automatic shift uses more gasoline, so people really prefer manual shift cars.

In 2017, automatics were 10% of the market. In 2020, one source says they are 30% of new vehicles.

Back in the 1970s when I learned to drive, they didn't think manual transmissions were sufficiently important to teach. (A friend of mine taught me to drive stick shift a few years after I got my license.)

We had to provide our own car for the driving test, which was administered by the government agency that licenses drivers.

There's no differentiation between manual and automatic transmissions in the licensing of drivers, and I don't think there ever has been.

Unless it's changed recently, UK driving licences specify manual or automatic.

If they are slowing fast enough to need it. Usually for that to be the case, you'd either be braking anyway or the cruise control would be doing it for you as you catch up with the vehicle in front.

RH were the cheap end of the market, with poor standards and an awful build video rather than a manual. Not bolt together like a Caterham - you had to do a lot of measuring, cutting, bending and drilling yourself, but you could get a very good outcome cheaply, however, it was a lot more work.

They were unusual in that, for many years, they did not consist of body panels over a space-frame, but were of monocoque construction ... many in stainless-steel no less!

Heavier than many others too, but still a car that weighed less than a classic Mini, but sat lower and wider, with the engine behind the front axle line and with the ability to put a whole variety of engines in (from motorbike engines, up to [one factory example only] a V12 jaguar engine) so great fun.

In their peak years, they sold around 500 kits per year.

Eventually the company was sold to Great British Sport Cars, who produced a more conventional kit. They actually produce a kit designed for the US, where people have successfully built and registered them.

It depends upon the situation. If you spot a problem early enough, you lift off the accelerator and let the car slow with engine braking, changing down as the revs drop to a level suitable to do so.

With less warning or about town, you combine engine braking and use of the brakes.

We even less warning, you don't change down, just dip the clutch just before coming to a stop, to avoid stalling the engine.

Bloody hell, we never do that and the the driving school cars dont have any pedals in the passenger seat either.

Most choose to learn to drive in their own car and the driving school does have a few cars that they use for teaching those that don't have a car, but they are normal cars, no extra pedals.

No it is not. And I have just taught two who are married to drive here and they both passed the test the first time.

And when they moved to Sydney from a NSW country town

We arrived very late in Sydney after not stopping for any more than a couple of minutes for fuel on the way, because that car produced a very odd noise on the grooved concrete road down the mountains to ensure cars don't slip in icy conditions and I had to stop to check what was doing that.

I was coming back home by train because they were short of money. I normally fly. I had booked the train trip before leaving the country town and it only runs once a day to my country town, first thing in the morning.

I pulled up at the lights outside the central railway station with minutes to spare without knowing where the country rail lines were in by far the biggest railway station in the entire country, I pulled up at the lights, turned to him and said "I'm off" with no warning, grabbed my bag and left the car. He was bit stunned but managed fine, even managed to work out how to get onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge that he needed to get to the north side of Sydney Harbour where he needed to go, driving for the first time in the biggest most complicated state capital city in the country.

I managed to miss the train by minutes and he managed to come back into the city fine in the evening again that evening. Using the satbav in his Nokia phone both times.

Totally?

That's not supposed to happen. You should only lose the assist, so you just had to press the pedal harder. Depending, you'd feel the brake become "hard".

I remember that I would play with it. Car parked, engine stopped, press the brake pedal and release. After two or three pushes, it suddenly became stiff and would not yield: the vacuum storage was spent.

I don't know how the assist works in my current car (an Opel Corsa). There is no vacuum storage in sight.

I meant "here, the car is provided by the driving school"

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I don't see any "about".

But conversation often drift. The initial question was related somewhat to electronics, then it drifted.

Yes, there are some threads about electronic design. And some about politics.

We have never done it like that, just use normal unmodified cars, both when learning in your own car and when using the car provided by the driving school..

Yeah, I realised that's what you meant, but here, most do the test in their own car. Only those who don't have a car use the driving school car, and the driving school cars are unmodified cars, no extra pedals at all.

My father had a couple of Citroens, with their hydraulically assisted brakes. There was an accumulator to allow the brakes to stop the car if the engine failed, but after a couple of presses, there was NO noticeable braking at all. When I had to tow him, we used a rigid bar, as he effectively had no brakes and I needed to brake for both cars. Luckily we were only going a mile and a half to a garage.