Not the guard rail because those wasn’t one, but jammed the offside wheels against the curb to slow me down. Surprised I didn’t get a puncture.
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When you freewheel downhill in neutral you’re out of gear and there’s no restraint on the vehicle’s speed, so you accelerate. When you put it into a gear you’re doing the opposite - using the gearbox as a restraint on the engine to slow the vehicle down, and the lower the gear the better (as long as the revs don’t red line).
Try it next time you’re going down a decent hill.
Use Engine braking for times when you would rather not use the brakes, like going downhill in rain or snow/ice.
As for wear and tear…it’s negligible especially if you don’t redline it.
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USA must have something like this.
We do but the signs I can remember seeing are directed at truckers.
Car drivers not understanding or utilizing engine/compression braking is probably more prevalent here due to a couple of factors I can think of:
- Drivers aren’t as well trained as drivers in UK/Europe.
- Manual gearboxes are much more uncommon here, and getting rarer.
Although in modern cars even automatic transmissions will shift down to engine brake in certain circumstances (i.e., going downhill and braking or in some cases even just being completely off the gas pedal). Even the CSV in my gf’s Honda Fit does it, as well as the DSG in my VW Golf.
Yeah, those are directed at truckers too, to avoid noise pollution in more populated areas. (Compression or “jake” braking on big rigs is super loud.)
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You can ask Alexa to read your Kindle books aloud if you don’t want to pay for the Audible version. App is available for android/apple.
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You can ask the Google Assistant (probably other assistants too but haven’t tried them) to read a webpage.
I’ve been doing a lot of walking over the last year. Usually I just listen to music but my backlog of books is just becoming a list of books I’m not reading so this is a nice option, especially on my phone.
Sorry if obvious.
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