[paulca]

Good:
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAvJ6N2oDdI[/ame]

Bad:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeqKWPE5jYw"]How To Change Gears In A Car EASILY! (Basics For Beginners) - YouTube[/ame]
I mean the very first thing he does is drop the handbrake. FAILED. The last thing you do is drop the handbrake before moving off.


Actually if you spend a good 20 minutes browsing YouTube with the search "How to change gear" you will find quite quickly that the videos from the USA are the only ones where people do things differently and arguably wrong. In fairness they are usually done by "some bloke" 'and stuff' as opposed to a real driving instructor. I have found videos from driving instructors from the UK, Ireland, Europe, Austrailia and New Zealand and they all teach the same basic method to learners. Then you find the US videos and it's all stuff that would get you failed in the other mentioned countries. No problem in the US as nobody will fail for doing these things as there is no test. If the US did decide to enforce a test to be able to drive "stick" I don't doubt they would look at what other countries are doing and you'd end up having to learn just like we do.

Does it not sound like maybe as the USA don't tend to drive manual that you might not know what you are doing? To me it sounds conceivable. You don't have any official recommendations, you most likely don't have road safety boards doing research and you don't have any official driving instructors for manual. It's mostly just ad-hoc, made up, passed down nonsense. "My dad/mate/mom taught me this way" or "I learned on the Internet"

Sure when you get into sports driving all the videos on rev matching and what not are fairly interesting, but my point still stands that you don't need to do this to learn to drive manual. Nobody else in the world learns this way. It seems you guys skip the basics or learn them really badly then jump on to fancy rev matching and pedal dancing and I'd expect not learning how the clutch actually works for you in the process. Just my opinion from afar.

You may be able to smoothly rev match down the box, but if you can't change gear in the internationally accepted, standard, basic fashion, then you don't yet know how to drive or use the clutch properly.

I know 17 year old girls and 90 year old grannies who drive "stick" and can shift up and down the gearbox all day without a lurch and no rev matching in sight. It's all just clutch control. Something you guys seem to skip or consider it too much work for the clutch when that is exactly what it it was designed for.