So today I kinda had an emergency situation on a huge incline where the car infront of me slammed on his breaks while through a curve... I panicked a bit and threw my clutch in still in third gear and slammed on my breaks. I was at a pretty bad spot because any car going up the hill could've easily rear ended me so I began to get out of the way. The only problem was I didn't realize I was still in third gear so I kept giving the car gas and eventually I smelled clutch and saw some smoke.

I'm still new to driving manual but I did read somewhere that it doesn't smoke when burning a clutch like that? And also how much damage did I just cause to my clutch doing that? The car is still on it's original clutch at 80,000 miles when I bought it from the previous owner. I'm just worried that I just said goodbye to my clutch or something.

P.S The clutch felt weird to depress immediately after, more stiff.

 

No one can answer this question, but yes, you did cause a great deal of additional wear on the clutch. You'll just have to wait and see what happens. And it's "brakes", not "breaks".

 

Alright well I'm not too sure what signs I'm looking for but I took it for a drive this morning (After I let it sit for overnight) and the only thing I can notice is that it's easier to take off in 1st and shift into other gears.

 

Clutch life is dependent on user skill and judgement. By continuing to power up the hill in third gear your overheated the clutch lining and caused hot spots on the friction surface of the flywheel. Probably lost a few thousand miles of use with that abuse.

 

A clutch is only good as its operator. One of my work mini trucks had its first clutch change at 460,000km. The other truck barely made it to 120,000km. The difference? Driver.

That being said, you need to pay more attention. If you were moving slowly up a hill in 3rd gear and didn't feel that something was off, then you need a LOT of practice and definitely more focus.

 

Your right, I am still trying to get the hang of it since I only started driving for my first time last week. So I've been driving it for a few days now and some of the problems I've noticed, the first one I'm not too sure if this was before this happened but I'm noticing that the pedal is squeaky, when pushing it in past the biting point theirs an audible squeak that you can hear sometimes. Another thing that I'm pretty sure I caused is that the pedal likes to stick before I get to the touch point making it pretty difficult sometimes for me to get take off. Lastly the clutch feels somewhat easy to push in.

Is this a problem with clutch fluid? Does the master/slave cylinders possibly need replacing? Thanks

 

The changes you've noticed are more likely due to the damage to the clutch itself. Both the clutch disc and the friction material itself have been degraded and can't be altered. Start saving for a Nissan Key Value clutch kit to replace the clutch disc, pressure plate, slave cylinder and other parts. Have the clutch master bled with fresh DOT 4 fluid after the clutch has been changed.

Consider this a part of learning to drive a powerful, rear wheel drive performance car. Keep working on those clutch driving skills and learn about heel-toe downshifting to help reduce the stress on the clutch and the tranny itself.

 

A few bad shifts won't kill a clutch. I learned to drive stick on my 350z and I've put 90k on it since. I've had my share of mistakes, but it's at 172k with the factory clutch. If something like that happens, just let the clutch cool down. My guess is the smoke was the tires.

 

And you decided to start with a sports car like a 350Z?

 

I wouldn't really consider it powerful concidering there's kias with more power. Maybe for its debut time it was, but this day and age it's just kinda average.

 

True, but Kia is a front-wheel drive wonder with all sorts of built in safety features that this car simply lacks. There's a reason the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety considers the 350Z to be the deadliest car on the road.