When To Use Neutral Gear In An Automatic Automotive (And How To Do It Right)

For many drivers, a vehicle’s automatic transmission — essentially the most common form of transmission nowadays, more’s the pity — has three settings: Drive, Park, and Reverse. Most automatic transmissions, nevertheless, can do rather more than simply go forward, go backwards, and stop your automobile from rolling into traffic. Some have lower gears you may shift into. Other, fancier transmissions have things like adjustable shift points or a hybrid “manumatic” clutchless shifting setting. And all of them, from the only old-school Turbo 350 to essentially the most advanced modern auto, share the identical useful setting: Neutral.

Putting a transmission in neutral essentially disconnects the engine from the driveline. In an automatic transmission, neutral sits between reverse and drive (remember PRNDL?) and acts as a buffer between them. See, you are not presupposed to shift between reverse and drive while a vehicle is moving, because it’s bad for the transmission. Thankfully, the large brains who originally designed automatic transmissions held just as dim a view of the common driver as I do, and so that they put that little buffer in there just in case.

Neutral has a handful of knock-on positive uses as well. Throwing your automobile in neutral permits you to push it around, which is real handy if, say, your battery’s dead and your automobile won’t start otherwise you break down in traffic. It is also useful in an emergency, similar to within the rare case of a stuck accelerator or a catastrophic engine failure at speed. There are occasions, nevertheless, while you absolutely should not put your automobile in neutral otherwise you risk damaging your transmission

Truthfully, the one time you need to repeatedly use neutral is that if it’s worthwhile to push or tow a automobile. Say you get stuck within the mud and one other vehicle needs to tug you out, that is an important use case for neutral. There are other emergency uses — a stuck throttle, for instance, or a sudden brake failure — but these are extreme edge cases. Mostly, neutral is just to be used when moving a automobile that may’t move under its own power or when starting it might be an inconvenience (when moving it around in a garage, for instance), or while you’re going through an automatic automobile wash.

What you need to not do, regardless of what your dad told you, is throw your automobile in neutral when coasting down a hill or stopped at a lightweight. In the previous case, there is a pernicious myth on the market that coasting in neutral, especially down long hills, saves on gas. What it does do is take away a way of controlling your automobile from you and puts you in peril. If it’s worthwhile to speed up quickly to avoid a crash or debris, you are going to wish you’d already been in gear quite than fiddling around together with your shifter. Within the latter case, unless you are going to be stopped for a very long time, greater than a minute or two spent at a lightweight, just leave it in drive. In the event you’re going to be stopped for some time, put it in park. That is what it’s there for.

So, yeah, neutral is handy if it’s worthwhile to move a automobile that otherwise cannot move itself, or within the case of a rare emergency, but you should not need to make use of it for much else.