Dear Tom and Ray:

My future brother-in-law claims that it's more cost-effective to use your brakes rather than downshifting. He says this is true for both hills and normal driving. He argues that it only costs him a couple of hundred dollars to replace his brakes, while engine overhaul may cost thousands. Is it more cost-effective to use your brakes? -- Eddy

Tom: It totally depends, Eddy. "Hills," and "normal driving" are two completely different situations in this regard.

Ray: Let's take "normal driving" first. It's not the engine that gets takes the brunt of downshifting. It's the clutch that takes the punishment. Think about it. If you shifted up from first gear to fifth and then downshifted all the way back down again, you'd be using your clutch twice as often, and therefore wearing it out twice as fast, right? And a clutch can cost many hundreds of dollars.

Tom: So in "normal driving," it is much better, as your wise future brother-in-law says, to use the brakes to slow and stop the car.

Ray: On steep down hills, however, it's a completely different story. And you'd be crazy to listen to the advice of your knucklehead future brother-in-law.

Tom: If you overuse your brakes on long, steep hills, you can cause the brake fluid to boil. If the brake fluid boils, you can lose your brakes entirely. And if you check with your local body shop and emergency room, they'll confirm that having "no brakes" is not a very cost-efficient way to go down a hill.

Ray: So on steep hills, you're much better off putting the car in a lower gear and using the natural braking action of the engine to keep the car at a reasonable speed and take some of the load off the brakes. And, since you're not doing a lot of shifting in and out of gear, the extra wear on the clutch is negligible.

Tom: So on one count, your future brother-in-law has proven to be a genius, and on the other count, he's proven to be a knucklehead. So average those two together if you want to know how seriously to take his advice in the future, Eddy.

Tom and Ray lead you step by step through the process of finding and buying a reliable used car in their pamphlet How to Buy a Used Car: Things That Detroit and Tokyo Don't Want You to Know. To order, To order, send (check or money order) to Ruin, P.O. Box 536475, Orlando, FL 32853-6475. You can also order online.

© 1997 by Tom and Ray Magliozzi and Doug Berman Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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