Mr Cholmondeley-Warner wrote:If you want to be an advanced driver, learn to love changing gear. If you want an easy life, get an automatic.
I do enjoy changing gear on the way
to school when I'm awake. It's a problem on the way
back, after a long day. You older chaps may scoff at me moaning about a day that only contains 5 hours 20 minutes of actual work, and usually less due to free lessons where I can relax a bit, but it's hard going, being profoundly deaf and having to rely exclusively on lipreading as none of the teachers are permitted to use sign language.
Mr Cholmondeley-Warner wrote:... and be thankful that at age 17 you have exclusive use of a nearly new car to take yourself to and from school. Not something that was common when I was at school.
I don't have exclusive use of the car. My parents still have control over it, they just happen to find it more convenient for me to drive myself as it means my mum doesn't need to get up early, and my dad can start work at 8:00 AM and finish at 4:00 PM rather than have to take 2 hours out of his working day every day to do the hour round trip.
Discov8 wrote:Love gear changing, going up and down thru the gears, block changing, matching speed and rpm. Even with the auto I go manual when out of town. Another alternative to an auto for lazy gear changing is a bigger engine that can pull from low rpm. But goodbye to fuel economy.
I do enjoy gear changing. But at the end of a tiring day, it's just yet another thing that you've got to deal with.
Gareth wrote:TheInsanity1234 wrote:But that's an awful lot of gear changing between 3rd and 4th on a normal country road where your speed varies between 30 and 50.
Cars with diesel engines tend to require more gear changes.
So I've discovered.
Gareth wrote:TheInsanity1234 wrote:That's spectacularly irritating when I'm aware of the fact a petrol engine probably could handle being in 4th at 30 anyway.
You'd need to compare like for like to see if it's true - that is, a Yeti with the nearest equivalent petrol engine - but you'd probably find fuel consumption is worse, and you might not like the lower amount of torque.
Just how much worse could the 1.2 TSI be? At least I'd have a bigger power-band to deal with so I could leave it in 3rd most of the time.
Let's just summarise, I love the car, it's amazing, but on a cold winter day when I'm tired, it's irritating.
But then so is just about everything else