A few years ago, I was on vacation with family in Martinique. We had rented a small, underpowered car (Hyundai i10, with a 1 litre engine) with a manual transmission, and I ended up as the designated driver.
At one point we parked the car among a row of cars on the side of the road, on a pretty steep downhill grade. The parking spaces were unmarked. Before we got out of the car, my sister advised that I should move the car back a little to avoid getting squeezed in later on, and I complied.
So:
I depressed the clutch and put the car in reverse;
I took the handbrake in my hand;
I spun up the engine to maybe 2000 rotations per minute;
I slowly let go of the clutch until I could feel the friction point, at which point I partially let go of the handbrake;
Still working at the friction point, with the engine still spinning at maybe 2000 rotations per minute, I backed up the car maybe a meter, which took 1 or 2 seconds;
I simultaneously reapplied the handbrake and depressed the clutch;
I put the car in neutral.
They were up in arms, saying I was going to ruin the transmission by abusing the friction point like that. They were adamant that it wasn’t necessary to use the handbrake at all, which I still don’t understand.
This is how I would have done it in my previous manual cars, but exaggerated / calibrated to account for the tiny engine, steep hill and 4 adults on board.
I don’t know what you should have done, but I would’ve done the same thing for the same reasons. In such a situation you really need to be able to control the brake and the clutch simultaneously and since we don’t have 3 legs, well that’s what the handbrake is for.
My current car is a manual with a fully electronic parking brake – it’s either on or off, nothing in between. I avoid parking on hills because I don’t have the ability to add braking while using the clutch.
Tell them it was a rental and the rental company can deal with any future clutch issues.
If there were no cars behind you, then you might have been able to just shift it into reverse and drive backwards for a bit. But if you’re on a hill and there is a car back there, abusing the clutch a bit is a tradeoff for being able to inch backwards and not hit the other car.
You don’t absolutely need to have the handbrake and the clutch active at the same time if you are fast enough, coordinated enough, and don’t mind the possibility of hitting the car in front of you. If it’s not something you do often I’d call it the certainty and not the possibility.
Modern manual transmissions have rollback protection, where the break automatically stays engaged for a second or two when you’re on a hill. I don’t know whether it works forward and backward, but probably.
That’s why it’s probably OK to have an e-brake that’s either on or off – the rollback protection will do the job you would have done with the handbrake.
I would add ‘and familiar enough with the car’ (although that is mostly to avoid hitting the car in front of you).
You could, if the bumpers line up well enough, gently nestle your car against the one in front, and use it instead of the handbrake. But that probably would caused yelling also.
I read this as the advice came from the not-manual-savvy passengers? I think you should have asked them how to juggle the clutch, brake and gas pedals with only two feet so that you didn’t accidentally roll forward at any point.
Even if you are good enough to pull this off, it is no better for the clutch than what the OP did. There is no way around slipping the clutch a significant amount when accelerating a manual uphill. Until you are at the minimum stall speed of the engine, you must slip the clutch, and the forces on it are much greater than they’d be on flat ground.
No, the manual-savvy bro-in-law was in on it too ! After the protest died out and I was alone with him, I asked him how he would have done it, but never got a clear answer. He just decided to drop the matter gently so I wouldn’t put him behind the wheel for the rest of the day.
I grew up in West Virginia. The house I grew up in was on a hill steep enough that a parked car slid down the hill one winter. Another house I lived in was 800 feet difference in elevation between our neighborhood and the main road (and the neighborhood beside ours never got finished because the first house that they built literally slid down the mountain - they never built a second house). I know hills. I learned to drive a stick shift on those hills.
The only disagreement I have with what you did is this:
Once you feel the clutch grabbing, you can completely let go of the handbrake. Leaving the handbrake partially engaged abuses the parking / emergency brake pads and adds unnecessary wear to the clutch.
It’s perfectly fine to use the handbrake to prevent the car from rolling downhill. Just don’t keep the handbrake engaged (even partially) once the clutch grabs.
On the other hand, it’s a rental car. Who gives a flip. Do what you want.
Well, obviously you pop the clutch, hit the gas, and scream backwards for exactly the correct fraction of a second to be able to slam on the brakes and come to a stop one meter further up the hill.
I use the handbrake to be safe on this. Much less stressful and more controlled – for me – than doing the quick clutch-throttle thing. Yeah, it’s not supposed to be good on the clutch, but how often are you doing this? I’ve never had to replace a clutch, and I’ve driven three vehicles to 120K+ miles plus.
Yeah, no matter what when you engage the clutch on a hill you’ll take a little life off the clutch. If you do it a few times you’ll begin leaving more room in front of you to start with.
You did fine. If you did that every day for months or years on end, perhaps the clutch would wear out prematurely. Once? It’s a rounding error in the life of the clutch.
I don’t either but that’s in a car I drive every day. In an unfamiliar rental car on a steep hill? I might give the handbrake a try if it thought it would help prevent rolling the car but since I’m not practiced at it, perhaps it wouldn’t.
Me neither. The most I’ve put on one clutch was 92,000 miles before I got rid of the car. I’ve also put thousands of miles on cars on tracks without replacing a clutch on those either. My team’s race car might get a clutch in the off season but it had 6,000 miles on it before I joined the team and it’s picked up several thousand more miles this season. Since I only put about a 1,000 on it, I’m not taking all the blame.
It sounds like their concern wasn’t so much with the handbrake, but with spinning the engine to 2000 rpm while barely engaging the clutch for a few seconds. And…maybe they kind of have a point? If you knew the car and friction point well, yeah, you could have backed off the rpms and engaged the clutch a little more.
But in an unfamiliar car, there’s no way you hit that right on a hill. I’d have done exactly the same as you. And as pointed out, it was a couple seconds - not worth worrying about in your own car, let alone a rental.
