[quote=butcher ]It's no different to pushing the brake pedal a little bit, or pushing it a lot. You brake a little, or you brake a lot. No different with the engine, you chose the gear based on the speed you want to go, whether you're speeding up or slowing down.
Sure, and if you want to slow down a little you ease off the accelerator. If you want to slow down a bit more you use the pedal just to the left of it rather than messing around with other controls.
I dunno. I feel it's quite important. Essential even for winter driving in snow and ice. It surprise me that some people never do it.
In normal driving conditions, there's absolutely no benefit to using anything other than your brakes to slow down. Sure in slippery conditions you might use engine braking to control your speed, but still not to slow down.
But given those thoughts I'm going to come back to your earlier post I was going to leave alone:
[quote=butcher ]using the engine to brake is more economical in the long term on a modern car, for a couple of reasons: modern cars cut the fuel when engine braking, and braking in many circumstances is just wasting energy.
As above, it saves no more fuel to engine brake - if as it appears you do mean to change down the gears. The engine will be using no fuel either way.
Plus selecting the right gears gives you better control over the car.
Using the controls designed to slow you down gives you better control of the car. If the engine isn't bogging down then you're in the right gear, and if you're braking to a stop then you it makes no difference what gear you're in, if you're not then making a single gear change to the appropriate gear for pulling away again is more efficient and leaves your hands on the wheel and you in better control over the car.
Must admit I'm crap with the clutch. Handbrake is useless in my car, so I sit on the clutch all the time.
Holding the car on the biting point? 😯
There's a big difference between going down through the gears to decelerate (outdated procedure which lessens driver control) and shifting into a lower gear going down a steep hill to control speed. The latter is an important technique because lengthy continuous application of the brakes can get them so hot you suffer brake fade (as you would if you took most road cars on a track day).
The biggest two downsides of going down through the gears and using engine braking to slow down are that all the braking forces are only coming from the driven wheels (particularly bad in a rear wheel drive car) and the braking effect peaks just as you've released the clutch going into a lower gear. I remember experiencing the risk of that when my mum was driving on an icy morning, downshifted before a T-junction and the driven wheels locked and we skidded along the road out of control... With the footbrake twice the tyres would have been sharing the grip and the ABS would have kicked in to help bring us to a more controlled stop, plus she could have intuitively lifted off the brake pedal.
We talked about the problems with engine braking combined with ABS years ago, Chiefgroove guru. I was advocating "clutch down and steer" and "brake hard clutch down with ABS" in icy conditions. Surfmatt was on the thread too! At the time I wrote:
ABS has its limits, it can manage the force being applied to the brakes but does not manage engine braking forces. When you go from gritted roads to sheet ice, engine braking alone can slow the road wheels faster than the ABS would normally allow. I've experimented and found the following sequence if you engine brake and brake but don't declutch on ice: You feel the ABS working initially then nothing, the engine revs drop and it starts to hunt as if it's fighting the brakes, then it stalls and you glide on with the driving wheels locked until you declutch. Try it on an empty car park next winter.