291–300 of 729 posts
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The key word in the parent post is "adaptive". With adaptive CC, you don't do anything in stop and go traffic other than minor steering. The car just keeps about a car length distance with the car in front. It is very nice convenience feature.
I'm familiar with the concept, but I can't imagine I'd use it any more than I use regular cruise control on an empty highway.
Despite the title, it never explores why this phenomenon is specific to America, except to note that "the 5-speed manual is [still] the most popular transmission in the world".
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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 a…
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…
The shop that built my engine told me they wouldn't have done it if I was under 40.
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Getting up was fine. Stopping at the precipice at a 4 way stop, then trying to start again was the tricky bit. With an auto you can hold the brake while you slowly press the accelerator, then release the brakes. Need a third foot to do that (or a hand brake) with a manual. Edit: Hill lock definitely sounds nice. Didn't exist when I was young, poor, and had crappy old American made manual shift cars...
As you said - that's what the hand brake is for. Performing a hill start correctly is often part of driving tests in the UK.
There's little argument for manual transmission anymore except in larger vehicles. There used to be an efficiency gap, in that a good manual driver was more efficient than an automatic. But two things have happened since then, we have computer controlled transmissions and CVTs. Manual drivers were more efficient because they learned when the vehicle would need to shift, and shifted preemptively. A computer controlled…
I think the most compelling argument surely, is that it's just more fun. You actually feel like you're driving, it makes it more of an active experience. Recently sold a manual car I owned for about 12 years, upgraded to a newer car which is automatic (only because there was no option for manual). Man, I miss driving a manual!
And another one is I tell the car what I want to do. Sure it can try to figure it out, but it will never know exactly what I want to do. I can do something quicker than an automatic will know. For example, I'll know I need to be in a lower gear because I'm about to floor it. An automatic can't know that.
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That is interesting. The one electric motorcycle that I heard of that was super fast was the KillaCycle[1]. I think it only had one gear though and a 0-60 mph of 0.97 seconds. The motorcycle nearly killed it's owner[2]. [1] - http://www.killacycle.com/ [2] - https://www.engadget.com/2007/09/13/all-electric-killacycle-...
is....is that how it got its name? (serious question)
Ah, globalisation.
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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 a…
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.
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To all the folks replying that someone will fill the gap in front of you: that’s the point. It isn’t about reaction time. It’s about letting traffic flow easier, not fighting with each other. It removes the need for your fellow drivers to feel a tension when it is time to switch lanes, to not have to make a risky maneuver. You get to relax when driving because now you aren’t competing to get to your destination, and…
This comes up often, but you gotta think about what would happen if everyone suddenly tripled the gap they leave in front of them. The same road surface would suddenly have 1/3 the throughput. I shudder to think what kind of traffic jam / commute time that would lead to at the edges of the road network. I do appreaciate when people drive densely packed and I try to do the same (up to a safety limit). For merging ther…
At the same velocity. It's quite possible that with the increased gap and increased flow (less stop & go), you could get higher velocity out of it to compensate. Maybe not 3x the velocity, but 2x gap and 2x velocity seems within the realm of possibility (a 60mph road that slows down to 30mph because people are driving stupidly).
Edit: on the low end, this seems quite possible. Increased gaps raising the mean velocity from 5mph to 15 or 20mph.
I'll concede all of the other advantages of automatics and add getting the car moving from a stop on a hill in Seattle, but there seems to be no way to get rid of the latency when I need to downshift right now , is there? I hate that about automatics. Floor the gas, count 1,2...ok here we go.