If you’re used to driving a stick shift, knowing if or when it’s OK to skip a gear or two can be very important, depending on the type of car and road you’re on.
According to Engineering Explained, as long as you’re mindful of one or two issues, you should be able to skip gears safely, with “safely” being the key word, especially if you don’t rev-match and you’re taking a corner at high speed, or if the road is slippery.
Also, if you don’t rev-match, you’re likely to cause additional clutch wear, which will probably come out of your pocket if you happen to be the owner of the car.
What about from a stand-still thought? Should you skip a gear then? Well, some automatic transmissions actually do that, automatically – pun intended. They shift directly to 2nd gear (Snow mode) if the road is particularly slippery.
Lots of people do the same thing with manual transmissions as well, but we’re not sure if clutch wear should really be considered an issue here since even during winter time, 2nd-gear starts are performed only in certain conditions, and certainly not loads of times per day, 7-days a week and so on.
The video does conclude with the reviewer saying how we shouldn’t even consider starting in a gear that’s higher than 2nd, and that 2nd-gear starts are OK from time to time if you’re struggling to get going in 1st.