To make sense of the gear stick, you need to know what the gears do.
Gears control the way the engine interacts with the driving wheels. Your choice of gear depends on the speed at which you are travelling and what you want the car to do.
Gear and speed range guide
(novice drivers only – experienced drivers know the right gear by the engine sound)
1st gear: 0–10 mph
2nd gear: 10–20 mph
3rd gear: 20–30 mph
4th gear: 30–40 mph
5th gear: 40+ mph
Use of the gears
You can only do certain things in certain gears. You cannot use 5th gear to move off, and you cannot drive at 60mph in 1st gear.
- Lower gears (1 and 2) are powerful gears for starting off
- Higher gears (3 and above) are cruise gears for higher speeds
- Reverse gear is for moving backwards
Moving off from a standing start takes a lot of power. That’s when you use the lower gears. As your car gathers speed, you change, step-by-step, into progressively higher gears for:
- putting less pollution into the air
But if you move to a higher gear too early (i.e. to a gear that’s too high for the speed you’re doing), your car becomes less responsive. It feels slow to react when you press the accelerator. You should always feel some instant acceleration when you press your right foot.
The lower gears are also useful when you need a quick burst of speed for overtaking, and for climbing hills. Remember, the lower gears are more powerful.
Number and location of gears
Your car could have four, five, or six forward gears as well as neutral and reverse.
- Forward gears: The pattern of gears depends on how many gears you have. Look at the diagram to see which gear stick matches your car. Whatever car you have, the layout of gears 1 to 4 is always the same.
- Reverse gear could be at top left or bottom right.
- Neutral is always in the cross-piece between gears 3 and 4.