Considering that you only do it maybe a few times over the life of a vehicle (and only once you suspect it to begin with) it's really not that drastic. And if the clutch is good, then you also find out if your motor mounts are.


A while back I needed to pick up something for the GF and a friend at church offered his old Nissan 4x4 "if you can drive a stick." No problem there, so I go over to pick it up, I think it's about 215K on the clock, drive off. Get a couple miles away and enter the freeway, sitting in 4th (out of 5) at about 40 in the weave/merge lane, step on the gas (about half-throttle) and hit the turn signal and then engine revs way up while truck barely accelerates. Oooooops. I went back to his house and he's like, "what do you mean the clutch is slipping." We go out to the freeway and he's simply winding it out through the gears before he shifts, so he's never accelerating much in 4th or 5th. But he said go ahead and take it, so I was just really careful and gentle with it. Darn thing was slipping badly enough it also used more than a 1/4 tank to go about 60 (nearly all freeway) miles. Sheesh.

But no, I didn't need to do the slip test outlined above on it.

I do recall going with a friend to go look at a high-mile import of some kind back in the 80s (he asked me to come along because I actually knew something about cars). I felt the clutch slipping just on a gentle drive with him in the passenger seat, and I pulled into a grocery parking lot and did the above test. The parking brake worked well so I didn't even go for an immovable object (besides which I knew it wasn't going to need that). I rolled it up to 3 grand and dropped the clutch and the engine barely changed RPM. Now THAT is a worn-out clutch.