how do you know when to change gears in a manual car?
In: Engineering
An example I haven’t seen yet in here (but plenty of good answers), have you ever rode a bicycle with multiple gears?
You start off in a low gear, it’s easy to get moving but eventually as you speed up you’ll be working too hard to maintain the speed you want. So you switch to a higher gear, pedaling suddenly becomes easier and you can maintain a higher speed until you get going even faster and then it’s time to change gears again.
Once you start slowing down or come to a stop however, those higher gears stop being effective. If you’re in a high enough gear you’ll just be spinning the pedals and getting nowhere. So you need to gear down to an appropriate gear.
It’s essentially the same thing in a manual car, except it’s the engine doing the work. 1st or maybe 2nd gear will get you rolling from a stop, but get going fast enough and that engine will start screaming at you and you won’t be able to go any faster until you shift up. Likewise 5th or 6th gear are what you’ll be using on the highway, but they’ll probably stall the engine out if you try to use them from a stop.
While cars will typically have suggested speeds and/or RPM ranges for gear shifts, eventually you’ll just learn to feel based on the engine and the type of driving you’re doing when it’s time to shift.
Going by speed is the easiest but also the most incorrect way. You can go at 20 on a level road in gear 4 but if the road is steep, you might need to go down to 2. What matters is how much load the car is carrying.
All experienced drivers do it by feel. And this feel is an internal assessment of multiple factors such as sound of the engine and rate of acceleration.
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