How to Diagnose a Slipping Clutch in Your Car

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Mark and in this segment we're going to cover how to diagnose a slipping clutch in an automobile. There's several different symptoms that you're going to pick up that may indicate that your clutch is slipping, one of which being smell. As you start off from the light you'll get a kind of a pungent burning type smell or under rapid acceleration where you're; at times when the clutch is slipping one of the byproducts of a slipping clutch is a burning type smell. You may have smelled in under hard braking coming down a mountain pass, it'll give you the same type of smell as a hard brake use if your clutch is slipping. Some of the other symptoms you can look at is when you're trying to take off from a stop on a hill or under a load it will seem you can hear the engine rev, watch the tachometer on the engine go up extremely more than normal as the speed starts to increase and kind of feel the car slipping and then slowly grab it as the clutch fully locks up. These are some of the indicators that you might feel when you're getting a clutch slipping. Another good way to tell is most all transmissions in the final gear, forth or fifth gear is a one to one or very close to a one to one ratio and locked up with the engine. So if you get out onto a highway and put the vehicle in in high gear, forth or fifth which ever or even sixth speeds now, you'll have a one to one lock up with your engine speed and your vehicle speed. And what you do is push down hard to to try to make a hard acceleration and watch as your tachometer, and speedometer go up at the same rate. If your tachometer goes way up and your speedometer's just going slow and then just comes way back down, that's indicating the engine RPMs are increasing without the vehicle moving at the same rate. Being as a transmission's in a final ratio of one to one they should be directly correlated with each other. Other words, if the tachometer goes way up without the engine speed increasing accordingly, that's a good indication you have a slipping clutch. Just simply take it in to any automotive repair facility and they'll be able to tell you whether that's a simple adjustment or if you're going to need a clutch replacement. So those are some of the symptoms that you may experience that indicate that you have a slipping clutch. Thank you for watching."