Coasting at highway speed, good? bad?

[dosmastr]

I have a 10 mile drive to and from work and I used to have a beat old Point A to B car that I didn’t really care about. It was worth 300 bucks… and that’s only if someone could overlook the hideous ricer paint job (all primer, plus a very bad looking black racing stripe) and still find it worth 100 over scrap lol.
280k miles….ugly… but it got me where I needed to go.

I get off work at 5 am when the roads are empty, and the last leg of my trip home has a jug handle. (those outside NJ may need to google that:) )
I’d cut the motor at 60mph (manual tranny, shift to N ) turn the key back to acc (so all the gauges and such came back on) and just coast the last mile and sit at the light until it turned green.

aside from the obvious safety concerns that the brake booster can deplete and no power steering (it was a little car, didn’t really need the power steering anyway)

Is it really something that is bad for the car itself?

The only info that I could find about this said the manual transmission only pumps oil when the motor is running and I may have been running the tranny dry. True?

The idea was I wasn’t burning gas that last mile or at the stop light, and I still covered an extra mile 5 days a week, I got about 36-38mpg, but I’ll round down to 30, I got 3 return trips per gallon and saved a mile each trip… in theory increasing miles per gallon by 3 each if my head math is right. (Though I don’t only come home from work obviously so it was an overly simplistic approximation)

That being said, the few times I checked I didn’t notice a difference so I stopped doing it.
But I never got over the whole “What if” question with regard to it being bad for the car.

The engine is out of gear and sitting off, but the tranny…. Thoughts?

Topic

[Kevin Criswell]

As far as the car goes, I don’t think you ware hurting anything. The only part spinning in a manual in neutral are under the oil level so they should be fine. But the big issue is no way to speed up in a hurry, if you encountered an emergency (animal in road) your ability to swerve and avoid it are almost nil with no power steering, reduced braking power and no ability to accelerate.

Remember when you drive there are only 3 things you can do, slow down, speed up and change direction. With the car off and coasting you killed one option completely and severely reduced the remaining two.

[dosmastr]

speeding up is for sure done (unless I pop the clutch to get it running…which takes time)

braking, I get a few good stomps lol, but pumping it doesn’t last but maybe 3 full pumps.

I’m a super shoulder man, power steering not needed! I contest last point being reduced 😉 lol

That all being said, your point is well taken.

[Lorrin Barth]

If the steering locking mechanism is still intact I’d be concerned about inadvertently engaging that. So, I’d suggest throwing it in neutral and letting the engine idle.

[Author]

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