Re:Fewer than 3% of cars sold in the U.S. have manual transm...
by userbinator on Thursday November 17, 2016 @06:49AM
(#12976574)
With automatics you would need to brake down the hill to stop the car "running away" as it wouldn't engine brake automatically to compensate for gravity's effect.
Most automatic transmissions (or at least the ones I've driven, which arguably is not more recent than late 90s) have low ranges where there is engine braking. That's the exact use case for them. Automatic doesn't (or didn't) mean that you must never shift manually.
Automatic transmissions in large vehicles like trucks and buses usually don't have freewheels either, so there is always engine braking.
Most automatic transmissions (or at least the ones I've driven, which arguably is not more recent than late 90s) have low ranges where there is engine braking. That's the exact use case for them. Automatic doesn't (or didn't) mean that you must never shift manually.
Automatic transmissions in large vehicles like trucks and buses usually don't have freewheels either, so there is always engine braking.