Drive in Deceleration to discover the joy of simple driving

Drive in deceleration.

Do not go too much into the word deceleration. The gist of the term is do not always treat a car driving as a video game where you need to press and hold the forward arrow for the car to keep moving. So when you press the accelerator you are pumping fuel into the engine. Again do not treat this like an exercise to understand automotive industry. It is best if you could understand the basic summary of this technique to drive and once you understand it is upto you to apply or not apply based on whether its convincing or not. For the moment lets unlock some more aspects of this type of driving.

STEP 1
So lets say you start in a upward slope. Here is what you would do

Start the vehicle
Press the clutch, hold the brake, shift to first gear and then remove handbrake [last thing to do before release clutch?]
Now since you are holding the brake vehicle will not go back.
Slowly start to loosen the clutch hold. On finding the ideal position you realise the car is finding power to go forward.
Now loosen the brake slowly. As you reach the ideal spot the car can start moving in forward direction.
Now legs is off the brake and car starts to move uphill and clutch is released.
Now you accelerate.
The car begins to move upward faster and you find that you need to switch to the next gear. Can you change the gear before finding some movement of the car ?
Actually not. You will notice that the car is not having enough speed to move forward while you change the gear by pressing the clutch.
What is actually happening is when you try to shift to second gear, you need to press the clutch. On pressing the clutch if the car has not gained enough momentum it will start to go backwards. Isn’t it ?

STEP 2
So now once you come to the top of the hill and start descent. Lets say car is moving downward, what do you do naturally ?

You can shift the gears without worrying about car going in reverse ? Right ?
Now as car is accelerating by itself in downward slope, You tend to free up the holding of car by moving to the higher gear numbers 4, 5 or 6 to ease the car motion ?
Did you press the acceleration pedal in the downhill?
Probably not!
Now if there is a turning in the downward slope what is the natural thing you do ?
Press the brake to slow down, change to a lower gear 3 or 2.
Now question is do you press the accelerator ?
If you do press the accelerator it is because you are actually trying to maintain the speed that you were descending. You are a man on a mission. You have planned a trip that you want to complete the entire journey in 5 hours or there are several vehicles behind you that want to go fast.

Now first step to realise what I am saying is to avoid pressing the accelerator pedal and try to use the acceleration that your car already has! and make way for that acceleration to translate into linear motion for your car by relaxing the gears and moving to higher gears.

Now go ahead and try the above procedure on every downhill road in your place. See if you can just change the gears to cover maximum distance.

STEP 3
Now that was easy learning on ‘how to use your acceleration’. Now the tougher part is to use the same logic on a flat road.

So once you accelerate in second gear, remove leg from accelerator pedal and try to use the acceleration and momentum and shift to higher gears a tad quicker. Now what you have done effectively is use the acceleration of second gear to translate to linear motion instead of keeping the acceleration high even in 2nd and 3 gear. Now imagine you have a push car and your home granite is the road. Now lets say there is a speed breaker at next 10 ft [ in real world lets say 50 metres].
Do you push the car with sufficient force to stop at 10 ft Or
Do you hold the car and keep pushing it in constant acceleration up to 10ft in 2nd gear or 3rd gear where we find the speed breaker Or
Do you push the car with very high speed such that it reaches the speed breaker at max speed and brakes are applied.

So in general
If you accelerate 1/3rd of distance then it is enough to decelerate [ the catch term] for the rest 2/3rd distance by just quickly shifting to higher gears.
So the goal is to quick shift to higher gears and lift the leg off the accelerator. So when your leg is not on the accelerator, the concept is what i am terming as deceleration. Because from movement perspective when you car is just moving ahead with the momentum that it acquired in previous acceleration the car is almost gliding smoothly as your race car that you just pushed. It does not accelerate but its a constant speed and is not same as your ability to keep the acceleration pedal pressed and trying to maintain constant speed. Uff that was tiring literature!!

So go ahead and experience it. Just use the initial acceleration and free up the gear system by moving to higher gear maintaining the speed. So you are not pressing the accelerator pedal constantly and hence saving fuel. Also you are not losing on acceleration by accelerating and then using brakes. So in other words the speed with which you arrive at the speed breaker and speed which you actually had to arrive at the speed breaker could be treated as the loss that you suffered interms of fuel. So use fuel, and hence acceleration only as much as it requires to reach the required place with required speed. So the delta in speed achieved and speed achieved by braking is essentially the fuel lost because there is no way for the engine to store the energy generated in engine due to acceleration pedalling.

How to observe whether you are doing the right thing. Now lets say you are behind a car which is moving at fast pace.
You can observe that you did not move at the same speed as him. You accelerated after there was enough distance created between him and you and you saw him slowing down at lets say 100 ft from you. You accelerate for the first 30 ft and deceleration journey starts from 30ft to 100 ft. You basically do not press the acceleration from 30ft onwards but just use the acceleration you generated from 0 to 30 ft. So while you see that your front vehicle applied the brakes. Changed gear to lower gears. climbed the speed breaker. All this you can watch as your car is gliding from 30ft to 100 ft at probably 4th gear and your leg off the accelerator!

You will observe that the car travels smoother in this decelaration phase. In acceleration phase there is a pull inside the car and is not smooth. There are no sudden brakes when you drive in decelaration mode since you do not waste acceleration and use the speed to automatically arrive at the speed required. You will observe that the vehicle in front of you is accelerating initially. You will observe that your vehicle approaches his vehicle smooothly without the need to brake and reduce speed by huge margin. You will find yourself maintaining maximum distance from the front vehicle because you only accelerate once you have the 1/3 space. In neck to neck traffic you travel in first or second gear based on whether road is uphill or downhill or flat and acceleration pedal is not pressed fully, more of a touch once in a while. Once distance between front vehicle and your vehicle is more than 30 ft you start accelerating a slowly in second gear. Shifts to 3rd, 4th in no time. This shift in gear is normally very quick and happens in a matter of seconds.

Sir/Madam welcome to the world of deceleration.

Now for people who say that is exactly what I do – Please do comment and acknowledge that ‘deceleration’ is a true thing !

For people who are not driving like this, it is a great opportunity to start something new today.

Hope you enjoyed the read.

Wish you a Safe driving!