Skip to main content

Reply to "Teaching the kid!"

Danny’s tip of finding a parking lot and just doing 1’st gear starts over and over is great.  Once you’re moving, upper gear shifts are much easier.

Once he/she feels semi-comfortable starting from a stop, find a parking lot with a very gentle slope uphill and park on that and do the start from stop again.  As Danny said, let them find the clutch engagement point on the slight hill and play with clutch engagement:  More pedal push = slip backwards.  Let the pedal up = slide uphill.  I first explained the mechanics of what’s going on with the clutch and my two both understood that right off.  Then they could understand why the pedal movement translated to car movement and how it was controlled. 

Once they get the engagement feel, then show them how to hold on a hill with the handbrake to not roll backwards downhill when stopped, then do the start from stop thing assisted by the hand brake.

Both my kids learned on automatics - That’s all we had back then.   My son now has 6-speed 911 and has gotten pretty good with it.  He’s always taken to the Speedster without much trauma, but he’s had a motorcycle for about 20 years, too, so that helps.  My daughter and her hubbie are both quite happy with Their automatics.

×
×
×
×
×