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

You can do it, you just have to let the clutch out extremely slowly (or rather, hold the clutch at the bite point for quite some time until you have reached a high enough speed) and press the accelerator enough.

Source: I started going in 5th once just for the fun of it.

Disclaimer: This will wear out your clutch.

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