What you used to learn in driving school ...
10/10/2015
One reason why young drivers get on worse with old cars than they used to is because of driving school. In fact, in past decades, drivers learned many useful things there that are no longer an issue today.
For example: how do you start a car when the starter motor isn't working or the battery is (almost) flat?
Driving instructors used to teach you to put the car into second or third gear, switch on the ignition, let the car accelerate (on a downhill stretch of road or with the help of a neighbor) up to 15 or 30 km/h and then simply engage the clutch. If everything went well, the engine ran, you could disengage the clutch and keep the engine happy.
Today, no new driver can master this "trick", apart from the fact that most operating instructions rule it out (because of the risk to the catalytic converter) or the operating electronics make it impossible anyway, if there is still a clutch at all.
