Modern manual cars have start/stop technology too.
However, it's more convoluted to use. You have to engage the clutch, put the shifter in neutral, and release the clutch again. Compared to automatic where you just have to hold your foot on the brake pedal.
Stop/start reduces fuel consumption on test cycles like NEDC for both automatics and manuals, but I'll bet in the real world the benefit is mostly seen with automatics as many manual drivers will rarely bother to use it.
I've driven manuals most of my life. Before stop/start came along, I was in the habit of just holding the clutch pedal down while stopped at intersections or in traffic. Anecdotally, I think most drivers do the same.
Now, when driving stop/start equipped vehicles, I always try to use it. But in a manual, it does takes more thinking and effort and I wonder how many casual drivers actually bother.
The thing is, most of the time you don't really know how long you're going to be stopped for. Will that light take 3 seconds or 30? A manual makes you decide whether to stop the engine, but an automatic just does it every time without having to think about it or perform extra steps. (although, you can override it if you know it's going to be a short stop by just pressing the brake lightly.)
I drove a WRX for five years and the clutch was kinda heavy. Not terrible, but enough that I'd put the car I'm neutral at a red light of I was there for more than five seconds.
I'm glad start stop is supported on manuals this way. It makes sense. I thought the stop start systems didn't really save much fuel, but I've read some real world tests that clock in at 8~10% savings. All that idle time does really add up.
I consider holding the clutch down really unusual. Never did myself except when I was pretty sure that start/stop would trigger unnecessarily.
Now I just don't care about that, since it was too annoying at stop lights, which has led to incidents of auto-stop and immediate start and even a half auto-stop. Didn't notice and bad effects on the car.
> I was in the habit of just holding the clutch pedal down while stopped at intersections or in traffic.
If you take a driving test in the UK and do this, that would be a minor fault. You can only have a few minor faults before you fail the test. The rationale is that you need to be in full control of the car at all times, and when you set off you mustn't drift backwards at all. The easiest way to do this without needing three legs is to use the handbrake. Unless you have a diesel engine that has enough torque without any pressure on the accelerator pedal to pull away.
There's lots of minor faults that don't reflect how people actually drive.
For example if you are turning right and waiting for oncoming traffic to clear, then someone pauses and flashes their lights to let you turn, if you then turn that would be a minor fault in Driving Test conditions - where you are supposed to ignore the driver inviting you to turn and sit like a diddy.
Also you are allowed 15 minor faults before failure, which is quite a lot really.
Huh? Whether or not you put the shifter in neutral has no effect on handbrake (hill) starts. You can still (more quickly, in fact) perform a hill start without also having to put the car back in gear.
And now days, newwer cars have the "hill hold" feature which automatically prevents you rolling backwards anyway.
Before stop/start came along, I was in the habit of just holding the clutch pedal down while stopped at intersections or in traffic. Anecdotally, I think most drivers do the same.
I usually keep my foot to the side, as I was explicitly taught in driving school by a professional instructor to do. And if the master cylinder ever starts to malfunction, since the plate spacing is really tight, keeping the clutch pedal depressed while stopped could prematurely burn up the clutch and the torque plate.
I don't hold the clutch for too long because that will increase the effort from my left foot, and I don't like how it feels after a week of driving that way.
So, it may require more thinking, but I can rest my feet while the light is red and it actually feels good.
By holding down the clutch pedal, you are literally destroying the clutch. When I was in the driving school, I was taught to never do this. If you are stopping, even for just few seconds, put in the neutral. It becomes automatic movement in a short time.
Few years ago, I had colleagues who came from a certain foreign country and were not used to manual transmission. They got a company car with manual transmission. The clutch was burned in one month.
I don't think having the clutch down destroys the clutch, how would it do that? It is having the clutch partially engaged for a very long time that would destroy the clutch.
A clutch is destroyed by friction - slippage between the two plates that comprise it. This is a useful characteristic when pausing on a hill for a few seconds but I suppose there must be some people that keep the clutch partially engaged for a very long time.
But if you are sitting at a junction with the clutch entirely depressed for a long time the plates are disengaged and no damage is done. That's a bad habit for other reasons, such as if you get rear ended your car is still in gear and could then cause a further accident.
I generally don't. I too have driven several manual pickups, and only once had a squeaky throwout bearing. But I bought that one used so who knows what it had gone through before me.
I've never heard of this rule, and I suspect it's more valid for tiny European cars than for pickups. If I want to take off quickly, e.g. third in line at a short left turn, I keep the pedal depressed. If I'm tired, I'll shift out of gear. If neither of those conditions holds, I might shift or I might stay on the clutch.
And crankshaft thrust bearings, which could ultimately lead to crank walk. It's more of an issue on high performance AWD cars which require extremely strong clutches. All of that clamping force (probably thousands of pounds) is essentially pushing the crankshaft "into" the engine.
Some engines are more susceptible to this than others.
Holding down the clutch pedal when stopped won't harm the clutch, but it may put excess wear on the throwout bearing that allows it to slide back and forth.
When stopped you have two options in a car, sitting with your foot on the clutch (which is flat out bad) and putting the car in neutral.
Putting the car in neutral is basically one meaningful action - changing gear, yes you have to depress the clutch move the gearstick to neutral and then let the clutch go - but to describe that as "cycle the clutch twice" is madness. Am I missing something?
Manual car with start&stop owner here; I always use it when driving in the city, so do all of my friends. It's just slightly uncomfortable the first times, when you have to train your muscle memory.
Not really an issue. The energy used to restart the engine is small compared to the fuel savings. An electric starter motor is very efficient compared to a combustion engine at idle.
Stop/start will automatically disable if the battery has a low state of charge.
It's a pain...and depending on the break, it really may become pain.
Usually if I drive my manual private car, I disengage the gear already on the way to the red light. It just rolls. I break, motor turns off. When I want to start, I push the clutch, motor turns on, off you go.
The good thing is, If I want the motor to launch, I can by pushing the clutch slightly. I can also release it and put my legs wherever I want. I can relax.
Holding one leg constantly on the break is just annoying. For you, your leg and the guy behind you who has to look into that bright red light pointlessly shining in his eyes.
It's a pain...and depending on the break, it really may become pain.
Oh, with an automatic you have the option of putting it in Park also. Certainly, it's a good idea to do that if you're stopped for more than a few seconds. You don't have to keep your foot on the brake, but doing so is enough to activate stop/start.
> You have to engage the clutch, put the shifter in neutral, and release the clutch again.
That's both a long-winded and incorrect way of putting it. If you are stopped, then you're either already in neutral with the clutch released or the clutch is already engaged. There is no other way.
Really, the rule is just "you have to have the clutch released". For experienced drivers of manual transmissions, this is one smooth action.
Don't know why you're getting downvotes without comments. It's as valid an opinion as any, especially given the leverage you can wield with 1,000 employees these days.
I don't think anyone would argue that there isn't a certain size of corporation over which there are more disadvantages than advantages (to society at least).
How much power does that use? I run linux a firewall/router on an older laptop + usb ethernet(2) and it's about 20w. I'd prefer < 10.
Perhaps I need to try Raspberry Pi next.
The Raspberry Pi is gonna suck as a router due to the "Ethernet on USB". You'd be much happier with one of the boards that chrissnell mentioned above.
Personally, I use a "Maxxwave 1106" running BSD I had laying around but it's on the more expensive side. If I was putting something together for myself, I'd get one of the small Atom boards with a couple of onboard Intel NICs.
I've been running OpenWRT on an PC Engines APU board (4 core x86 based w/ gigabit ethernet). According to the website[1] the power is "About 6 to 12W of 12V DC power depending on CPU load." Before my APU I ran an Alix board[2] for years.
It's a little bit more complicated to get running since it requires a custom compiled OpenWRT, but it's great to have more memory and disk space than I'll ever need in my router. I used to run on OpenWRT on reflashed consumer routers and I always had to be real careful about what I installed and ran. With the APU I can just install real `bash` and `less` and not have to deal with the crappy busybox emulations.
I have been running an IPcop firewall on an old PC for ages with three network cards. Just about to replace it with this small thing, also with IPcop, and it runs on a 4 watt power supply. I have realised that by downsizing my servers etc in the basement, now when they are a bit overkill (moved most stuff to a cloud solution) I can save enough electricity to power an electric car for most of the use I would make of it with what I save.
As mentioned, the ethernet interface is too slow for this. One could use one of the BananaPi variants for that, afaik there is one which has four independent ethernet ports for use as a router.
I use a standard BananaPi as NAS and are very satisfied with it. It comes with a SATA interface and 1Gb ethernet.
Is it because of an in-house software maintenance problem, or mostly due to being tied to 3rd party software and would have to buy new licenses / migrate?
I think it is a mix of lots of internally developped software which is not compatible, or at least not tested as compatible (and often this software is not developped anymore), cost constrains, and mostly a lot of bureaucracy and glacial-paced processes. I don't think it has to do with third party software.
[edit] in fact if anything third party software is forcing us to upgrade as we see some critical third party software progressively becoming incompatible with XP.
He's right. Mozilla, a $200-300 million a year outfit, currently maintains their software including Firefox. It's a huge C++ application. People who code XUL in their spare time, even a bunch of them, aren't likely to make a dent in keeping parity between a Firefox fork and the main release. They'd likely have trouble even porting it.
So, a fork is a rough solution and will have maintenance issues for an app this size.
Probably not for old "3 gear with torque converter" or similiar.