This is a question for the manual drivers in this forum.


After years of riding bikes and using engine breaking as a quick a easy way to shed speed. I wanted to get your opinion on doing it in a car.


To start, bikes are equipped with a wet clutch that does not wear the same as the dry clutch in a car. This enables us to do things like riding the clutch at slow speeds. Without worrying about harming the clutch plates. However in a car with a dry clutch, this is not a desirable thing, as we will burn out the plates and need to make repairs. (I am sorry if this is an overly simplistic breakdown of these two clutch types. I am not a mechanic, and only know what I have researched myself on the Interweb)


My questions is, how bad is it for me to downshift and have the engine help slow the Fit?


I find myself wanting to do this, especially going into a corner or other area where as soon as I am done slowing, I need to be in the right gear to accelerate.


FYI - I commonly apply the breaks while doing this, not only to assist the engine in slowing the vehicle, but also to let other drivers behind me know that I am indeed slowing down.


My mind tells me I should not do this, as it will create additional wear and tear on the clutch. Break pads/rotors are cheaper and easier to replace then clutch plates and springs. But I would love to know what the community at large says about it.

 

Most of the time I do a rev matched downshift. Since you have experience with bikes, should be a breeze for you. As long as it's rev matched, no worry about clutch wear. Maybe I should record a video with my downshifting skills on this 6 speed manual.

As for the dry clutch system, well ... that's just the way it is. It won't burn out/glaze unless you enjoy consecutive jack rabbit starts in stop and go traffic lol.

 

Nothing wrong with engine braking on a Fit. Slipping the clutch will wear it, but a little bit of moderation and in particular avoiding riding it (i.e. resting one's foot on the pedal while in gear) will go quite far to promoting long clutch life.

There are situations where engine braking is very helpful, even necessary for safety, such as when descending a long grade where the service brakes could overheat. For day to day driving, and in particular stop and go driving, it's not so much of a big help, but there's no real problem with engine braking either. Sometimes in slippery conditions it can help maintain control, though that was much more true without ABS.

(Engine breaking, on the other hand, is never good and generally requires a trip to the garage for repairs. Aren't homonyms fun?)

 

I've been driving manuals for 40 years and never had a problem with clutch wear due to correctly done downshifting, and by that I mean not having lots of engine speed mismatch when releasing the clutch.

 

That's the way I drive it. Down shift all the time. I live in the mountains. Used to hold in the clutch sometimes coming to a stop but that wears the brakes quicker and burns more gas on the Fit because of the fuel cut off. Now I hit the clutch right before a complete stop even if I'm still in sixth. This car rocks with the manual. I love driving it.

 

BAH!!! Breaking, Braking! Stinking homonyms!


Thanks for the input on the engine braking, and your experiences.

 

How do you rev-match on your DX? Do keep the clutch depressed while rev-matching or do you perform double-clutching? I do the latter because I was told it puts the less amount of stress to my synchro and clutch.

 

I drive my 2016 Fit 6MT just like my motorcycle, with the exception that my bike redlines at 9,800 rpm. I keep the revs down on the Fit for fuel economy, but for better acceleration I've revved up to 5k. The Fit redlines at 6,900. I do not know if there is a rev limiter. I engine brake just like my bike, and don't drag the brake at all.

Manual transmissions are so much fun. Rev matching is a skill worth learning, be it on a Fit or motorcycle.

 

aware as i am of the engine braking effect, PERSONALLY i subscribe to the "breakpads are cheap" philosophy and lately have been UPSHIFTING instead of DOWNSHIFTING to save engine wear. (at least i hope im saving engine wear) the pistons are only going to go up and down a finite amount of time. There are so many other variables it will be impossible to tell. Just my 2 cents....

 

My '16 LX is a CVT, but my previous 7 cars were stick, and I've yet to wear out a clutch despite many of them reaching 175K before they met their demise in one form or another.

My '08 Sport 5MT didn't need a brake job until 90K mi. I was doing the hypermile thing with that car, planning ahead as much as possible, sometimes shifting into neutral (this is illegal AFAIK) if I knew I'd be going into a freeway exit ramp with a long curve down. So I let the car's momentum take it as far as I could in neutral and then shift into gear only when I needed to accelerate onto the road at the end of the ramp.

Saves on engine wear, saves on brakes, but be ready to shift into gear quickly if something unexpected happens and you need to scoot.

 

This is how you down shift:

 

Thanks for the video. I've been driving stick for a couple of decades and never researched heel-toe shifting. I don't drive particularly aggressively but do enjoy taking the odd turn at speed.

Do other manual drivers use this heel-toe technique? Does it make your downshifts smoother?

 

Heel and toe is not used to achieve a smoother downshift. Its primary purpose is to attack a corner in the fastest possible way. Not every car can do heel and toe because of the gas and brake pedal placement. Instead, I do double clutching downshift to keep the engine in the optimal powerband.

 

I rev match to but notice that my fit won't allow me to jump from 6 to 4 or 3rd gear. I typically cycle down a gear at at time rev matching all the time.

 

If I'm coming to a complete stop, then I'll just brake then just slip it into neutral once the speed drops enough. Else I'll normally rev match/heel and toe say around corners or exiting the freeway and going back to city speeds. It's kinda funny cause I learned of heel and toe from the anime Initial D lol.

 

Is there a recall on the engine "breaking"?

 

Really? I downshift from 6th to 3rd all the time when I pass others on the highway. I always rev match it. Sometimes 6th to 4th will do.

I personally don't feel the need to use heel and toe because 1. I don't race my fit, and 2. I usually drive with safety boots on which makes it too bulky to do it safely. I always downshift first, then use the brakes if needed.

The main reason you would need to resort to heel and toe is if you want to do a rev matched downshift and use the brakes at the same time (because you don't have three feet to access all pedals at the same time).

I did hit the rev limiter a few times already. I find that it does not help much with acceleration unless power shifting it into 2nd. So yes, there's definitely a rev limiter.

I 'single clutch' it. I really, I mean, I really don't understand who came up with this double clutching nonsense. When my dad taught me double clutching, I did it a few times only to discover that a rev matched downshift does not need it.
It's good enough to keep accelerating *while* clutching it in and shifting your gear. Of course you need to adjust how much you accelerate while clutching it in order to raise the rpms to the desired level to make it pitch perfect. But I never fully release the accelerator pedal.

 

Just another data point for you - when I sold my nearly 13 year-old 2000 New Beetle TDI (5MT), it had about 229,000 miles on it, still running the original clutch (no slippage or other signs of being worn out), and I've always been a "downshifter."

I "downshift" my CVT all the time with the paddle shifters for engine braking, but of course, there's no clutch to wear out there.

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My understanding is that double-clutching is a helpful technique on non-synchronized manual transmissions, but I can't think of a single car or light truck today that uses one.

Unrelated, but I broke a clutch cable on my '64 Beetle once and was able to drive it just fine by rev matching to change gears. I of course had to shut the engine off each time I came to a stop so I could put it back in first. (c:

Es

 

Pretty much all manual tans missions in trucks and SUV's up till just a few years back you had to double clutch down in to first unless you were pretty much stopped. (Non synchronised gear.)
Double clutching is really an upshift event, it prevents hammering the transmission out of a heavy truck (IE over 25K lbs... ) Just shifting cleanly with out dropping the pedal or reving the engine too high is all you need..