Also a lot of the foot-operated parking brakes have hand-operated release levers under the dash. It’d be a little awkward but if you really needed to you could still do the handbrake hill start trick with one.
ETA: also a lot of the foot-operated parking brakes have an automatic release function that releases the brake as soon as you start moving. I don’t know if any cars have that in combination with a manual, but that would actually be pretty nifty for hill starts.
In 2013, only 3.9% of new cars in the US had manual transmissions, so being able to operate the gas, clutch, and parking brake at the same time is not really a big feature here.
I didn’t read each and every post but ------- some newer standards have a “hill holder” feature; my Subaru for example. Enable it and when you come to a stop over a certain incline it automatically sets the brake until you start moving forward. Really terrific feature with the amount of ice/freezing rain we’ve had around here.
Second I know has been mentioned but I’ll give the details anyway - you can do that basically yourself with your handbrake. Stop, foot on the clutch and brake and set the handbrake. When you are ready to move ahead, take the brake foot to the gas and start easing out the clutch and giving it gas as you remove the handbrake. My uncle taught us that was on a steep drive with a tennis ball between the bumper and garage door. Not only did he never have to replace the garage door, he never replaced the tennis ball. So it must have worked to some degree.
Learn how to do it with just the clutch and gas pedal.
Someday you might be in a car on a hill and the parking brake doesn’t work, if you know what you are doing, this is no big deal. If you are trying to learn in traffic however…
Also many/most automatics will roll backwards when in D by many won’t roll backwards if you select L or 1st. This is due to one extra apply in the transmission when in 1st.
Not necessarily all that new. My 1988 Subaru had a “hill holder”. There was nothing to “enable” that I knew of. It was there and it worked all by itself. It didn’t take much of an incline to trigger it. But you had to be going uphill. It didn’t work at all if you came to a stop going downhill. Here’s what it actually did:
[ul][li] You come to a stop, going uphill, with left foot holding clutch pedal down and right foot on brake.[/li][li] Remove right foot from brake while keeping left foot on clutch, and the brake remains engaged, holding the car still.[/li][li] Rev up engine with right foot on accelerator. Brake remains engaged and car remains stationary.[/li][li] Simultaneously, let out clutch pedal until it engages and car starts moving forward.[/li][li] Brake automatically disengages as you let out clutch. (IIRC, this would happen even if you didn’t rev up engine and start moving forward, in which case engine stalls. It’s the act of letting out the clutch pedal, not the act of starting to move forward, that disengages the hill holder.)[/ul][/li]The hill holder is a mechanical device that has connections to the clutch and the brake. The brake fluid actually flows through tubes in it, IIRC. Mine sprung a little leak once and had to be replaced. None of the mechanics at my regular shop had ever seen or heard of it before. They installed the new one but got one of the cables adjusted wrong and it didn’t work. When I took it back for adjustment, then they got it right. I remarked to them that they could all add hill holder to their resumes now.
This much rollback (in fact, any rollback) would be an automatic fail in the our driver’s test (which always includes a hillstart portion, in the testing yard before you even go out onto the street).
Use of the parking brake is mandatory in the driver’s test here. You have to engage the brake whenever you stop the car at (non-yield) intersections or parking. The service brake is for when you want to slow down. Also, you can be held liable if you’re rear-ended at an intersection and you then rear-end the guy in front of you, and didn’t have the handbrake on.
Of course, very few people drive like that after they pass the test. But I use the handbrake all the time, all the same, especially on hills. It makes it so much easier.
I see you’re from SA/ZA, but that’s the same as my UK friends have described it to me. Parking brake mandatory, and one test described to me was the instructor would put a box of matches (or maybe it was a pack of cigarettes) against the rear wheel, and if you dented the box/pack at all on a hill start, you failed. Now whether this was the idiosyncrasy of a certain tester or just made-up, I don’t know, but it was imparted to me that absolutely no rollback was permissible. Any reasonable incline and I prefer to use the parking brake because it feels much safer to me.
To be clear, this was one of my first hill starts ever. My point was that even a worst-case-scenario for a complete rookie isn’t the bumper-smashing affair that it feels like in your head. After a few weeks of practice anyone should be able to pass your driving test sans-handbrake, unless not using it is an automatic fail for some reason. And I’m curious what they’d do if someone showed up with a foot-pedal parking brake. It’s not exactly safe to have to reach down under the dash to release a parking brake while trying to do a hill start, especially for shorter drivers.
And I’ve never understood this. The parking brake is pretty poor at holding the car still; it can easily be overcome with a slight amount of engine thrust, and I don’t imagine it would be of much use after being rear-ended by 4000lbs of steel. In America, we’re taught to stand on the service brake (what we just call the brakes) at a stop, because the real brakes can actually prevent the car from moving. There doesn’t seem to be much logic to using the parking brake on hills; perhaps it’s a relic that just hasn’t gone away yet.
Don’t know, never seen one. I’m not sure if those are even legal.
We might be talking about something completely different here - the handbrake is next to you, not under the dash. It’s to the rear of the gearstick, I’ve never seen one under the dashboard.
Handbrakes - or emergency/parking brakes - have been implemented in a number of different ways. My wife’s Prius has a foot pedal, my Subaru has a push button on the dashboard. The rental Hyundai Accent I’m driving today has a lever between the seats behind the gear shift. I’ve also driven cars with handles to the left of the steering wheel that you pull out and turn 90 degrees to release.
That’s because we live in different countries with different cars. When you have bench front seats there’s no room for a handbrake. Mostly that means trucks don’t get them, but we have a long history of trucks here. I’m sure Australia is the same way.
Here’s what the parking brake looks like when it’s under the dash. When you step on the pedal it ratchets down, then you have to pull the handle towards you to release it. For short people, that means bending forward, which would obstruct their view. That’s what we call it a parking brake and only use it for parking 
The parking brake on the floor thing definitely isn’t exclusively an American thing, BTW. Notably Mercedes have almost exclusively used floor pedal parking brakes. A lot of other “upscale” European and Asian cars have them too. They’re usually in cars that would typically come with an automatic, but you see them in cars with manual options.
That’s fine if you have a hand brake. But some standard-transmission cars have a foot-operated parking brake, which would be problematic. (FWIW, the four MGBs, two Porsches, one Triumph Herald, one Courier pick-up, and two Toyota pick-ups I’ve owned/driven in my life have all had hand brakes. For the motorcycles, of course, I have my feet.)
I’ve been driving a manual for 20 years. Once I had some practice with the manual transmission, hills were zero problem at all. I never even notice hill starts, even though I live on a very steep hill and do a “steep hill start” every single day. You just have to get used to the feel of your car. Eventually, it becomes second nature.
I don’t even know why people are going on about parking brakes. It’s totally unnecessary on hills.
This. I’ve been wondering if I should speak up. I would feel uneasy around a driver that felt the need to use a parking brake on hills.
I have no problem with someone using the handbrake in a manual transmission car on a hill. I used to drive a manual and use the handbrake now and then at a stoplight on a steep hill if some jerk decided to get right up on my rear bumper.
Also note, many newer cars come with a Hill Start Assist function that automatically holds brake pressure for a few seconds or until you’ve applied the accelerator pedal after lifting off the brake pedal on an incline.
I’m not sure I would go that quite that far. But I do think of using the emergency brake on hills as being a crutch. It’s what you do when you’re first learning how to drive on hills. After a while, continuing to use it is kind of lazy.
Lazy, or not really mastered driving a manual.
I agree that it’s a skill that should be in your box of tools for driving. But it seems in this thread, that many do it on a regular basis. That surprises me. I’ve never been with anyone that does this, unless on the steepest hills.
I’ve used this ‘trick’ when backing up my VERY step drive to hook up to my utility trailer. An inch or two counts. I’ve never seen anyone do it on a regular basis.-
An observation - My '84 Jeep CJ7 did not have a middle handbrake. I don’t think many ‘off road’ vehicles do. Could be wrong. If there was any spot where this would really help, it would be on steep jeep trails. Do Wranglers, FJ’s et-all have center hand brakes now?
To the OP - It really is an easy thing to master with some practice. As you are a new driver, if you think you would feel more comfortable in an automatic, that’s fine. You might not be finding a good place to practice this.
For those people, like myself, that use a handbrake, it’s because that’s how we were taught to drive. It was part of our training that attempting your style of hill start was not the way to do it. It would also mean a fail on your driving test doing that way. I guess that’s why manual trans cars and light trucks have hand operated parking brakes (also known as the handbrake, so you can see how ingrained that is here). Even if your car has a bench seat, it’s perfectly possible to have a floor mounted lever. The 1973 through to sometime in the 80s Holden Kingswood/Belmont had the lever between the driver’s seat and the door. It was also a drop down mecahnism, so was easy to forget it was on and try to drive off. Usually you could move off, but stopped pretty quickly with a squeal of tyres when you went to change into 2nd gear and the rear wheels locked up. 
By the way, a 2014 Chevrolet Malibu I drove in California had a foot operated parking brake and to release it, you pushed down with your foot to release the ratchet mecahnism. As far as I could tell there wasn’t any handle under the dash to release it. That would so not work if you had a manual trans and had to juggle with the clutch to do a hill start.
That’s how it is for me, and that’s what I feel safest doing. I’m not sure how it can be termed “lazy.” It’s more work than not using the parking brake. I can do it without the parking brake, but I prefer hill starts with the parking brake, because there is absolute zero chance of me inching back even a millimeter if I do it that way. shrug I can heel-and-toe double (de)clutch, rev match and shift without using the clutch, and all that, but for steep hills, I feel far safer than taking the shortcut of not using the parking brake. YMMV.
