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I drive a standard and Halifax is full of steep hills. STOP PULLING UP TO MY ASS! When I inevitably roll backwards into you, through no fault of my own because you were only TWO INCHES AWAY, you’re going to be the ones paying.
—P.S. Learn to stop at stop signs, not after them.
This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2010.
38 Comments
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Learn how to start on a hill without rolling back.
But yes, people who drive automatics tend to forget that not everyone does. Many have never driven a standard and probably don’t even know about the roll-back problem.
Put a 2 foot receiver hitch on the back of it. When you roll back into the asshole who can’t give you 3 feet of wiggle room, it’ll puncture his grill and rad. Lesson learned.
bullets on to something there…
not sure why people would do that… I always make a note to leave enough so I can see the road under their tires of the car in front of me. that ensures that if the fucker brakes down and can’t get out of my fucking way, I have enough room to veer around.
Valid bitch. I’m good at not rolling back but it sucks when you’re in a line of traffic and have to creep slowly uphill, like in a line of cars waiting to turn left or something.
zZz is correct…that is my rule (not that i have very many) you must be able to see the bottom of the tires on the car in front, but i don’t roll back…lots of of practice
learn to use your clutch a little better then. people make me sick with this kind of bitch. don’t know your car, stay the fuck off the roads.
you should be able to bring your clutch pedal up enough to let the clutch start grabbing the vehicle…which will hold the car in place, feather a little throttle into it and pull away without backing up an inch…thats how you drive a stick. thirty inches of roll back space is a joke and for people who cant drive a stick shift anyways.
As for the above comment with the trailer hitch…i’d think twice..its agianst the law to leave your trailer hitch mounted without a trailer hooked to it….fyi
lol nobody drives with a stick shift.. unless you’re compensating for something.. Anyways there is no way to not roll back in an automatic, deal with it, accept it, and move on.
Right, LS and Ninja, maybe easy for you with years of practice and knowing your vehicle, but that’s not what we’re talking about here are we. I don’t “ride” the clutch, like you suggest, it wears it out. Some kid that just learned to fucking drive it last weekend won’t have the same skills, add nerves, and you have a crunched front end of the impatient, ignorant prick behind him. Roll up an inch behind me and you’re going to be my backstop. Have a look around, LOTS of people leave the 2″ receiver in, legal or not, it’ll teach people a lesson when the steam is flying out the front end of the car.
Drove a standard for years in hfx with no problems, it must be your fault/incompetence.
Echo64, keep your automatic and enjoy the extra cost up front (they cost more), the increased liability for failure, and the poor fuel mileage (driving a manual can save you around 15% on gas). Anyway, A+ bitch. We bought a new car that was a lot slower to “catch” than the old one and it took a bit of getting used to. People would beep at me if I rolled back a bit, but for fucks sake, stop coming up to my back bumper by an inch. Fuck off, I shouldn’t be able to see your fat head in my mirror.
Put a big sign on the back of your car warning other drivers that you’re not so hot at driving a standard. lol
Ummm, Calvin? Poor fuel mileage for automatics compared to manuals? Cars built in which century, dude?
Fact is that with modern sedans, compacts, SUVs and pickups you’ll generally see no combined (city+highway) fuel mileage difference at all for most models, occasionally *up to* 1 mpg difference in favour of manuals for a small percentage of vehicles, and very seldom as much as 2 mpg difference (usually in city driving).
If you happen to have one of the modern vehicles, and there won’t be many of them, where the difference between manual and automatic is as great as 2mpg in city driving, and you have the top-notch top-10% manual stick driving skills to take advantage of that, and you drive, say, as much as 5000 km per year in city conditions, why, you might save as much as $100 per year if you were driving a pig of an SUV. Maybe $50 per year if driving a sedan. That’s just stupendous savings, old boy.
And that savings is only realized if you are good at driving a standard. I grind so many gears I’m sure I’d get waaay less fuel efficiency with a manual. Besides, how am I going to talk on my cell phone if I have to keep reaching for the gear shift?
If you haven’t the skill to start from a stop on a hill without rolling back, you can use your emergency brake to keep your vehicle in place while you get the clutch engaged.. Having had to drive in mountain areas (BC), I learned to use this when parking on a steep hill.
Or you can practice on hills until you get your shit together…
If your car is rolling back, there actually might be something wrong with your clutch. Get that checked, because you’re endangering me, the automatic-loving car driver.
@ Mikey, that’s good in theory, but you have to practice somewhere. Subaru’s have a “hill holder” function on their manuals, take the foot off the brake, and when the clutch engages, the brakes come off automatically. Still think people should leave some fucking room though. If you’re stuck in traffic mid-hill such as the connector from Kempt to Windsor, you’re riding the fucking clutch all the way up there and some asshole clinging to your back bumper doesn’t make it any easier.
Oh come on Miles, the truly gifted stick driver can shift, guzzle coffee, grab bites from a sandwich and talk on their cell in supreme synchronicity.
Echo, some of us prefer a stick – more torque, more power management, and the option to have a diesel.
There are savings with a standard. When I bought my car a few years back, the standard cost $1000 less than the automatic. (So 18 000 vs 19 000.) That was cash in my pocket and mattered enough to me.
I thought there were savings on fuel too, but what do I know. Also, I thought there were savings on maintenance, but again, I don’t have the proper knowledge, only that of the purchase price.
I’ve never had any additional maintenance cost with an auto; although I know I’ve been lucky.
Fuel savings are nominal in a standard, unless you’re driving a model made before 1990, and, like Calvin said, that has to be ideal conditions. To each their own though, if I lived in a flatter city, I’d drive a standard, just because it would be more fun. In HRM though, especially in Dartmouth, it’s a pain in the friggin’ arse.
I’ve had both automatic & standards for about 35 years & often one of each. THe amount of transmission problems i’ve ever had are so minimal,nothing stands out they’re all just maintenence. Never noticed a plus or minus for either…except automatics are easier/less work to drive.
ha ha Three….I’ve been the passenger in cars with pros like you…I’m definitely not one of them though…I’d just be endangering the lives of others.
I appreciate the benefits of the manual transmission, but I don’t like driving so much that I notice the benefits you get from added control over torque and power. I also don’t care that much about the cost difference. It’s worth it to me to just have to worry about the accelerator and brake and not have to deal with a clutch and gearshift. The only place I prefer a standard transmission is when driving off-road.
I drive a standard, always have. Only real men drives standards. I never roll back.
lol….rolls….reminds me of Rita McNeil…now she’s one that rolls back down a hill.
Must be new at the standard driving? I can’t really picture a car parking literally 2 inches behind you on a hill, that would mean they are
{A P R O X T H I S F A R A W A Y}, which to me seems highly unlikely. Unless you really don’t know what you are doing, your car shouldn’t roll back any further then that on a steep hill. If it does, put the car in first, pull the E-brake up, keeping your hand on the E-Brake let your foot off the clutch and when you start to feel the car pull a bit, let the e-brake back down. Realistically you shouldn’t have to do that though. You have to remember, especially if you are already nervous on the hill, the car is probably not rolling back nearly as much as you think it is.
As for ECHO, Loads of people drive a stick and it has nothing to do with “compensating” for something. Touching on some of what Calvin said, sticks are cheaper, better maintained and IMO safer as you are going to know your car a lot better, and have more control over it. They are also way more enjoyable to drive for people who actually like driving, and don’t do it just to get to point B from point A. I love sticks, have never owned an automatic, and never will.
Yes. Well. *ahem*
That’s called a “figure of speech”, 1failingenglish1, and it doesn’t mean it was literally 2 inches…just like Noah may have poiut more than two animals on the ark, and they didn’t HAVE to walk side by side necessarily. Some animals, like the elephant, like to walk in single file. other animals, like the dolphin, don’t “walk’ at all, they swim, and not only that but they don’t really pair up the way the noah had hoped. In fact female dolphins are seperated from the school by roving hoards of males dolphins and the sort of ‘gang banged’ other animals mate with their counterparts a few tijmes and then never see them again, like guys in the military do in foriegn lands other animals like elk for instance don’t really have a mate, many different females can be impregnated by the same lone male while the other ‘lesser’ males never get to mate at all, just like back in highschool but noah, like you found it hard to write about these things because the different thoughts would have required different paragraphs and noah, like you, couldn’t be arsed to use the return key on his holy mac and if you read this whole stupid post you are either more bored at work that I realized or you are a suckerforpumishmentlikeiwas when iread theabovepost…
i love the stick, it feels like i have more control over my rusty wagon, and it has pretty good torque…did you know according to the driving rules you are not allowed to gear down/up in an intersection. but thats the bestest fun
O.K, well Kinda skimmed through your noah analogy or whatever it was, so forgive me if I missed anything you said. Yes the 2 inches was a figure of speech; however, unless said person was actually parked 2 inches or closer to the rear of the standard, and unless that standard driver has no idea how to drive a stick, they aren’t going to roll into the back of the car because the car isn’t likely to roll back any more then, literally, 2 inches.
“”O.K, well Kinda skimmed through your noah analogy or whatever it was”‘
What it was, 1failingenglish1, or at least what it was MEANT to be, was a lesson on avoiding huge ungainly BLOCKS of text when posting online. What is it…1996?
Look at some of the posts that came before yours, what do you see?
That’s right: miles, Dr. fever, realist in dartmouth….even Sebastien…are all able to seperate thoughts into digestable “tidbits” of brilliance, sarcasm, or in the case of ECHO64 some sort of odd penis analogy…
But you?
Your post looks like something typed out by infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters…
Sadly, I had to give up driving my stick-shift. I kept rolling ass backwards while applying my make-up, having my java, and talkin’ on my cellular.
Having an automatic helps in my ass- backwards life and I’m getting much better at not hitting the guy in front…
I have always driven standard, every now and then I will roll back a bit, actually a couple weeks ago I intentionally rolled back a bit more on a bus to teach the driver a lesson on getting up on someones ass, if all I can see is the white paint and nothing else the bus was too close!!!!! haha the look on that bus drivers face from my rear view mirror as I sped off from 1st gear to 4th in quick succession. I will also admit that when I first started driving standard I was terrified on hills, so I went out into “suburbia” and practiced :O!!! holy crap what a great idea practice!!! As for automatic I find driving them to be extremly boring…. you only use 1 foot to drive!!!!
it is boring and can confuse you…when i drive me pa’s tank the acceleration is just weird. its not the motor vehicle its moi
Echo64: Wrong. Nobody “drives” with an automatic. Hell, you can throw a 5 year old behind the wheel of an automatic and they’ll be able to drive it. Automatics are for lazy, incompetent morons who can’t drive.
An English friend of mine who moved here about five years ago was floored to see “everyone” driving automatics – in Europe automatics are for people with disabilities.
yeah… cause I know how to control a cars rpm and gear better than the people that make them for a living… let them program the fucker for optimal performance and ride with that.
It may be as easy as pointing, but so what. I get where I need to go AND I don’t have the fuss of double-clutching and making smooth transitions.
Why do people who drive standards get so defensive about it? It’s just a preference and probably strongly influenced by the type of car you first learned on. Unless you really love driving most people probably don’t notice or care about the advantages of a standard.
Besides, there’s more to driving than just changing gears. I know plenty of incompetent morons with standards who are horrible drivers and plenty of people with automatics who I feel a whole lot safer on the road with.
Doubleup87, I often drive my vehicle & use no feet at all. I just get the truck up to speed (about 10kms over the posted limit) & I flip the cruise control button to ‘on’. then sit back & make occasional steering corrections ~:)
Jesus . More like a ” I can’t drive stick ” bitch . I have to agree . I can slip the clutch on any bike , truck or car on a hill and not roll anywhere but forward . Yea sorry OP – learn to drive stick man !!
I also drive a standard, though it’s my dad’s car when I borrow it (yeah, I know…), so I don’t drive very often and therefore don’t have that much practice all the time. I drive maybe about once a week on average, and yes, I still stall occasionally and roll back a bit from time to time. It’s an old car too, OK! I think this is a valid Bitch. What’s the problem giving at least a few feet of room, anyway? I also agree that standards are better cars, too.
On the other hand, I was driving on the Barrington Street ramp onto the MacDonald Bridge the other day, which obviously isn’t that steep, and was stuck in traffic behind a woman who would roll back about three feet every time she had to move forward. A bit much! Luckily, since I was also driving a standard, I could roll back a bit too to give her the extra room she needed.