It’s both good and bad to drive a car like the updated 2024 Toyota Tacoma that can go off-road so well. You can choose 33-inch tires, and the vehicle has up to 11.5 inches of ground clearance. All of these features are great for staying on the road. Also, they are very good at getting you to make bad choices. It’s like they turn on the fuzzy part of your brain that says, “Yeah, it can make that.” Most of the time, they are right. Toyota has made off-road features better than in the last truck, so you can keep going even when things aren’t going as planned. Don’t Start or Stop the Clutch You can find a Clutch Start Cancel (CSC) switch in every Toyota Tacoma with a 2.7-liter four-cylinder turbocharged engine and a six-speed manual gearbox. It looks like a simple button. With CSC, the driver can start the Tacoma without hitting the clutch pedal at all. When would you need to do that, and why would you need to do it? This will be talked about later. The fourth-generation Tacoma doesn’t have the newest hardware for this technology because it was already in the first two generations. In any case, Toyota is using it for the first time with a push-button start in this latest model. Also, the CSC button has been moved to a better location near the bottom of the shifter boot. This gadget is called Crank In Gear and is only found in the Ford Bronco. It works only in 4LO. How does it do its job? This is how Clutch Start Cancel works. A neutral safety switch keeps a manual transmission car from starting without the clutch pedal being pressed down. If there wasn’t a neutral safety switch, the car could be started while it was in gear by telling the starting motor to spin the flywheel while the driveline was connected. This would make the wheels move and the car move. The next thing you know, you’re lurching into the return lane. Because it turns off the neutral safety switch, Tacoma’s CSC system makes starting the engine to get over objects less scary. Think of yourself as being stuck on one block and desperately trying not to fall backward into another. Why not just use the hand brake? To start, the Tacoma’s parking brake is electric instead of the more common “grip and rip” style. Matt Speck, a specialist in Toyota vehicle performance development, says that the automatic release controls are useful most of the time. Still, this technology adds another option for the worst-case situations. Also, rollback is less likely to happen because there is no balancing clutch, stop, or throttle during startup. Things going on in the CSC Speck says that the CSC works best in first or reverse gear when the transfer case is in 4LO, but it can be engaged in any gear or transfer case position. To turn on CSC, you have to turn off the engine, turn on the power, and press down on both the brake pedal and the CSC switch at the same time for 1.5 seconds. If you hold down the brake and press the starting button for another 1.5 seconds, the engine will start, and you can move. When the driver pulls their foot off the brake pedal and presses the gas button, the truck can move forward. Once you’re done, you can put the Tacoma in gear and drive normally. The system directions are shown in the instrument cluster when the CSC switch is turned on. There is also a 30-second cooling period to keep the starter motor from getting too hot. This system has an exciting feature that the eight-speed automatic Tacoma doesn’t have, but it’s not enough to stop the six-speed manual Tacoma. We like that Toyota keeps trying to make driving fun, even though manual gears are becoming less useful.
