What RPM to Shift At: Learn to Drive a Manual Transmission

Video Transcript

"I’m Rob with Expert Village and we are going to talk about the tachometer and why you see them in most cars with manual transmission. A tachometer is measuring how fast the engine is turning over. So as you are driving down the road and right now we are doing about 2,000 RPM’s, revolution per minute, and that is about the optimum time between 2,000 and 2,500 RPM’s if you are working on getting decent economy out of your car, that is when you shift around 2,500 RPM’s. If you need to pass somebody and need the power, then you take the car up to even higher and you can see as the car gets louder, the faster the engine is turning, the louder it gets. Now I’m at 3500, that’s for power. You shift again. You don’t need the power and you want just fuel economy, shift as early as you can with is like I said between 2000 and 2500 RPM’s. The red light exists so you don’t blow the motor up. If you over rev a car and the rev is not working or is one of the older models and doesn’t have a rev, the engine will let go and things can go very bad after that. I’ve had an engine blow up on me that actually caught fire because the engine opened up, oil went all over the car, the hot exhaust ignited the oil and the back of the car caught fire. It’s not a pretty sight. "