Trying to teach someone to drive stick...

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I've taught at least 7 people to drive a stick. Wife, 3 daughters, co-workers, friends. I've never had a problem explaining shifting back and forth between higher gears, the issue is always starting out in first gear. I liked the idea a few mentioned here of forcing the person to get the car moving in first without the gas pedal. I never thought to try that. Seems like a great way to teach the friction point and balancing at that point. Start in a parking lot. Expect a LOT of stalls. Some people pick it up after 20 stalls, some I swear must have stalled a 100 times! Kids I thought would get it easy ended up being the worst. The car makes a big difference. I think the Miata was the easiest to teach on. The VW beetle was the toughest. MAKE SURE to take him to a hill to practice take offs while on an uphill angle once he gets comfortable taking off on level ground.
 
So this is definitely something I can comment on. I just learned how to drive a manual recently (1.5 months ago). I, like your friend, wanted a Fiesta ST, which only comes with a 6 speed. I didn't know anyone who could teach me. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos explaining how to drive stick. I went to the dealership and told the sales person up front that I don't know how to row my own gears and he agreed to teach me after purchase. Signed all the paperwork and he took me to a parking lot. Spent 15-20 minutes learning and I drove the car 40 miles back home, with my mother who is normally easily scared right next to me.

I'm still iffy with the start and getting into the right gear after having to slow down, but it's becoming easier. Instead of stalling several times a day, it's more like a couple times a week now. The YouTube videos definitely helped. If I had a car to practice on before buying my own, I think the starting with just the clutch to find the engagement point would have helped. Oh, and I think when starting out, letting the clutch out slowly is really important. And like my sales person told me, more gas is better than less, but let the clutch out slow. It also depends on the car too. 7 years ago I tried learning it on a family friend's Cavalier. It felt impossible because the clutch was really stiff and high. The Fiesta has a very easy to drive clutch and transmission in comparison.
 
Funny stick story. When my mom was 18 and out of high school, working at a bank, she went and bought a new car. A bright orange super beetle with stick shift. She bought it without test driving it and had to call her dad to drive it home because she wasn't sure how.
 
Originally Posted By: Kibitoshin
There's a fun factor when driving stick. I was driving the beans out of my neighbors Toyota Tundra V6 5spd after solving a driveability issue which turned out to be a dirty MAF sensor and a defective air filter. No-fun factor would be driving in traffic with a heavy load.


There's also the factor of the trans never doing something stupid. At least once a day I swear at mine. It has the annoying habit of unlocking the convertor very aggressively--roll into the throttle after coasting just a little too fast, and it'll unlock. Then, if I'm under 10mph, it really really wants to be in 1st. Even at 10mph. I have to pulse the throttle, and then step on it again, for it to be in 2nd, which is where it should have been in the first place.

I constantly have to lock out upper gears, else it will try to be in the wrong gear around town. Also it doesn't play well with cruise control; it'll hunt on hills, doing double downshifts and then up/down until the hill is over with.

It really suffers from bad programming!
 
I've tried to teach my wife to drive a stick years ago. I decided I'd rather not get a divorce. :-/

My daughter took to it quickly, learning in an empty football stadium parking lot (which always has half a dozen cars poking around with parents teaching their kids to drive...). Her first car was a stick (still is 7 years later).

Age has a bit to do with it, I'm sure, but so does "overthinking" every individual motion. Also just understanding exactly what is going on mechanically helps. My wife kept asking questions like, "why is there even such a thing as a clutch?" and "why do I have to let it out slowly from a stop but not so slowly other times?" Just a fundamental not knowing how the drivetrain works really hurt in her case.
 
Originally Posted By: 440Magnum

I then bought an MGB as a personal car. I was about twenty two at the time.
A guy I worked with never did get the hang of it and used to get me and another to take stick cars for him.
Knowing how to drive a manual is less important these days, since manual cars are thin among newer cars, even sporty and exotic ones.
Still, a manual is always more entertaining to drive than an automatic and if you have to drive, then you may as well be entertained in the process.
Most younger drivers have no idea what they're missing.


I guess I'm not alone in cutting my teeth on an MGB
smile.gif


I feel pretty comfortable in about any manual car these days, but I have to admit that I still think the MG is one of the easiest ones out there to drive. One in good tune will move along flat in first without the throttle. The clutch is light, but not so light that there's no feel to it and you can pretty well feel the friction point.

One issue I DO have in other manual cars is that 1st in an MG is right where 3rd is on most 5 and 6 speeds. I test drove a Mustang for a co-worker back in the spring, and kept killing it because I'd try to start it in 3rd.
 
Any chance of having family or friends that are farmers? Learning the clutch engagement point on a tractor or some old pick up, IMO, is probably be the easiest, plus in the field you can experiment a bit more, like getting the tires to spin and not worry about hitting anything. If he has a hard time learning on that, then he should stick to automatics.
 
The MGB is really easy to drive.
The clutch isn't light but is very progressive and the shifter is like a bolt action rifle.
An MG is also pretty easy to shift without using the clutch.
Did you know that there was actually an automatic offered in the B for a few years?
This was probably during the era of the Austin Marina, which was oddly offered as the Morris Marina in its home market. These cars used the same powetrain as the MGB and a host of other Brit cars of the time.
 
+1
Probably the easiest stick I ever drove was a '65 GMC 3/4 ton 4X4. Other than the lack of brake assist (not that awful with drums) and power steering (only awful at low speeds) that truck, with the old V-6, was a great pleasure to drive. First was a granny gear and second gear starts were easily done with no throttle applied at all. It had 4.56 gears but was also on tall profile 17" tires, so that's a little misleading. The floor shifter moved snick snick from one gear to the next and the clutch was optional once on the move. I've never driven another synchromesh four speed that could be so easily shifted up and down without any use of the clutch.
I should have bought that old beast when I had the chance, six mpg fuel economy and all.
 
In college I did my duty and taught my sister and my girlfriend how to drive a stick. I'll admit that my girlfriend learned to drive a stick better than me!

I learned to drive a stick when I was a summer intern in the Manual Transmission department at one of the auto companies. I drove every stick, from subcompact to light truck. The easiest to learn on is a low-powered subcompact. The clutch and sweet spot of engagement is easy to manage. The hardest to learn on is a high-powered muscle car with a heavily sprung stiff clutch.
 
GF suddenly wants to learn.

Thinks it'll make things easier if she has to hire a car in the UK, which is probably true, though I'd have thought they're pretty rare birds just about anywhere else.

I am afraid.
 
Originally Posted By: fdcg27
The MGB is really easy to drive.
The clutch isn't light but is very progressive and the shifter is like a bolt action rifle.
An MG is also pretty easy to shift without using the clutch.
Did you know that there was actually an automatic offered in the B for a few years?
This was probably during the era of the Austin Marina, which was oddly offered as the Morris Marina in its home market. These cars used the same powetrain as the MGB and a host of other Brit cars of the time.


B-series 1800 Marina estate was my second 4-wheeled car. Nice engine. Drained the gearbox oil into a plastic coke bottle. Had some bearing rollers in the bottom and was about half full of settled-out metallic sludge, in black (steel) and copper-coloured (bronze synchro dogs) bands.

Think there might have been a band for each gear?
smile.gif
.

Put more hypoid in it (though that was perhaps a bit of a waste) and continued to drive it until a rear spring hanger rusted through. Still shifted smoothly.
 
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Originally Posted By: fdcg27
The MGB is really easy to drive.
The clutch isn't light but is very progressive and the shifter is like a bolt action rifle.
An MG is also pretty easy to shift without using the clutch.
Did you know that there was actually an automatic offered in the B for a few years?
This was probably during the era of the Austin Marina, which was oddly offered as the Morris Marina in its home market. These cars used the same powetrain as the MGB and a host of other Brit cars of the time.


AFAIK, the automatic B was not sold in the US. Whatever the case, it was sold in VERY small numbers. It's funny, too, because one major element of the MkII(1968) redesign was widening the transmission tunnel to allow for an automatic. Everything I've read about automatic MGBs is that they're real pigs. The car isn't exactly a rocket, but the peppy engine and the tight gear shifts make it a lot of fun to drive. A torque converter just sucks up too much of the available torque.

On the other hand, autos on MGCs were actually reasonably popular, or at least relatively speaking(~10% of total production). I've driven MGCs in both auto and manual form. The auto(especially in a GT) makes it a pleasant cruiser. The manual makes it feel like the fastest MGB you've ever driven
smile.gif
. In fact, I've seen it speculated that much of the early handling flack directed at the MGC was probably due to the fact that folks simply didn't realize how fast they were going into a turn. I can see how that might be true, as the engine has a LOT more torque and the rear axle is 3.1 vs. 3.9 on the MGC. You have a smoother engine that gets you to a given speed faster and is turning slower for a given number of RPMs...
 
DuckedB-series 1800 Marina estate was my second 4-wheeled car. Nice engine. Drained the gearbox oil into a plastic coke bottle. Had some bearing rollers in the bottom and was about half full of settled-out metallic sludge said:
The Marina was British Leyland era, and didn't use the BMC B range gearbox (Used in everything, in both column and floor change) but used a Triumph box...and they were dreadful. A local BMC specialist used to convert them to a BMC floor change gearbox....nothing wrong with a BMC box. The Triumph box wasn't so bad in a Marina with an A series engine, but got destroyed with the B, E and O block.
 
When I was younger, autos were almost unheard of here, nearly every car was manual. Less and less manuals on the road now. Part of the license test was a hill start - I used the company shop hack, a 105E Anglia van, and did the hill start with no rolling back - the cop said ''That was good foot work, now let me see how you can do it with the handbrake.'' You had to do the hill start using the handbrake.
 
I'd have to do some research on that, but the US would have been the only market with any potential for an automatic MG.
The MGC was a pig of a car with that vast old iron six ruining the car's weight distribution, although the shell did at least have to get a modern front suspension to make enough room to accommodate it. It was a poor substitute for the Austin Healy it was intended to replace.
A better fast version of the B was the MGB GT V-8 using the old light alloy GM engine. There was also the much later Rover RV-8 using the same engine built on the Tourer shell.
New MGB and Midget shells were available long after car production ceased in '79 for the Spridget and '80 for the B.
 
Until a couple of years ago you could still get a Morris Oxford too....rebadged as the Hindustan Ambassador. Badge engineering is nothing new to BMC products. They dropped the B Block in the '90's I think, but there was a diesel version of the B Block available at some stage.
 
I think they stopped making Hindustan Ambassador quite a while ago but your point still stands. If you want to buy vintage Fiat or vintage Morris, India would be the place to pick them up. I recall Wheeler Dealer had an episode where he did buy an Ambassador in India to resell in England and he made decent coin on it.

Getting back to the topic, Maxima 3.0 VQ engine is one of the easiest to teach manual transmission. My son learned pretty quickly. On flat road, there is no need to touch the gas pedal as it has enough torque to get it moving. Once he got that concept down, it was easy. Then we practiced starting on the hill with handbrake and later without handbrake.
 
Originally Posted By: clinebarger
I don't think leaning to dive a stick is all that important these days, Don't the cars that your buddy is looking at come with Automatics aswell??? Or is this one of those "Chest Thumping-I'm a MAN" Type things??

I dove manual shift trucks for 30 years before my current 2500HD.....Never going back!!


Considering almost every new car being sold in America is an automatic, no it is not that important. He is 32 years old, so if it was a form to display masculinity I would imagine he would have went with a manual many years ago.

After driving a base model civic for 12 years, I think he is just looking for something that has good engagement for a vehicle. Something that is more of a "drivers car". He doesn't want to spend a drop over 25k out the door so his options are limited.

Here's a few vehicles on his list:

WRX - a couple grand over his price range
GTI - also a bit too expensive
BRZ/FRS - right near his price limit, manual only
Focus ST - with rebates a base model can be had in the 22-23k range. Manual only.
Fiesta ST - 19k-20k is a realistic price if you shop around a bit and take your time. Manual only.

The Fiesta ST gets great reviews for fun factor (even more so than its bigger brother) and the price is aggressive. I know this car is first on his list.

As for an update, he seems like he is discouraged and maybe a bit embarrassed with how the first time around went. He still wants to learn, but he said just not on my car.
 
Originally Posted By: bioburner
Surprized no one compared trying to drive a manual car with riding a motorcycle. My first driving experience was a Moline tractor that had a stick to control the clutch and shifter. One really had to plan things without syncro gears but the clutch lever had about two foot of travel.

My first manual trans was a dirt bike, but I learned quite quickly in a car that you can't drive them the same! Well you can but the car clutch won't last long with the same abuse a wet multiplate clutch will take... 2nd gear WO launches and feathering the clutch on every second corner to get into the "power band" braaaap!

What I have found with a few modern fwd manuals that the engine mounts are so spongey you end up driving so the engine doesn't flop around like a fish. A solid poly torque mount solves it quite effectively but with some extra NVH at times which some people wouldn't find acceptable.
 
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