Car ~ Manual Gear ~ Learning From Mistakes

Here’s a Quote:

"You can learn from your mistakes BUT, It's even better to learn from other people's mistakes." ~ Unknown

2008Dec05, Friday, 0830hrs → I've just witness something we could all learn from. This guy got into the van (a Company-Van shared by many), started it, it moved back suddenly and rammed into a huge pipe creating a dent in the bumper. The van was a Manual-Transmission-Gear (MTG) vehicle. He got out and blamed the driver before him for leaving it in reversed gear. He was then puzzled that the car could move even with the hand-brake pulled up. He was lucky that there was nobody between the rear of the van & the huge pipe. This guy is in his 50s with many years driving experience. This shows that there’s such a thing as False-Security which grows with experience.

Here are the facts:

• It is the driver’s responsibility to check that the car is in neutral-gear before starting the car.

• Parking the car in gear is NOT a mistake. It is a common practice with some drivers to park their cars with the either the 1ST-Gear or Reversed-Gear in. There are 2 reasons for this.

1) It makes the car a little more difficult to steal by towing it away and

2) It prevents the car from rolling forward or backward when parked on the slope because the hand-brake is not very strong.