On manual cars, Why can’t a car start in a higher gear?

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As the title says, I know that different shifts mean different gear sizes bein used, but I don’t understand why it makes you unable to start moving the car. I have been able to start a couple of cars on the 2nd shift as an experiment and I understand that I could damage the car and I do it just once for testing purposes but I don’t understand why I cannot do so on other shifts. To clarify, I mean start as in start moving the car and not just turning the car on. Thanks

In: Engineering

46 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Sure you can, if you want to do a lot of damage to your clutch. (my old 2006 impreza 2.5i had an issue a couple of times where a linkage in the shifter would … disappear or whatever, and i’d be stuck in whatever gear i was in. both times it was 3rd gear. I managed to hobble it to a garage both times it happened.)

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