Hacker News Reader

In Switzerland, most instructor cars are Diesels, since they have higher torque and are very hard to stall. Then you go home and drive your parent's petrol engine car and you stall it all the time

View on HN

This is a really interesting comment for me. I’m a mechanical/aerospace engineer, I size motors by their stall torque all the time, I’ve owned/driven many manual cars over the last 25 years, I’ve done a few clutch jobs in cars, including upgrading a sports car (so I learned about and experienced some of the parameters that make a performant clutch perform). I’ve even had to replace a magnetic clutch on an industrial lathe when I did an automation upgrade on it and it exposed the fact that the clutch was worn beyond its spec - before it was manually operated and the operators just compensated for the wear over time although I forget how. Yet I’ve never put 2+2 together and thought about the torque in a car when starting out and how that relates to how easy/hard it is to stall a particular car.

Huh. That's completely the wrong way round. My instructor's car had a petrol engine that would have been appropriate for a skateboard, so I had to get the clutch just right and learnt properly.

Nonsense. The goal of a driving instructor is to teach how to behave on the road, not how to cajole your car into not giving up on you.

The pupil can do that on their on time, on the first shitbox they acquire. If you want to learn how to start an 037 without stripping the gear feel free to do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com