I picked up some friends from the airport today. We used their car rather than wedge four people into a VW bug. The strangest part of it was that their car is an automatic and I’m very much used to driving a stick. It took a conscious effort of will to not step on the non-existent clutch when turning corners or coming to a halt.
I’ve been in a car when the driver did just that. It was back in High School; my Dad was driving us out to camp in the old Jeep Cherokee that we had back then. The double-wide brake pedal of the automatic car meant that it was in the correct bit of space to have been a clutch pedal. Just within easy reach of his left foot.
If you’re not used to driving a stick, you probably don’t know that the action of the clutch is pretty much the opposite of the other pedals. When you’re changing gears (when you’re turning, for example) you stomp down on the clutch, change gears, and ease the clutch back up.
When you do that at highway speeds and accidentally hit the brake instead, you come to a halt pretty darn quickly… I don’t remember if we left a nice grouping of black lines on the highway, but it was probably a very good thing that we were already in the left turn lane with nobody behind us.