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A line from Mystic River:
They were playing with a gun, saw a car coming. One of the kids lies down in the street, car swerves, clutch kicks out.
I can't find a definition for kick out that fits the context. The phrasal verb apparently means something along the lines of to stall or to cut out. But the dictionaries only have to kick someone out of a place. Is the phrase used in this context a common usage?
The car stalled. When you're going too slow for the gear, the clutch can kick, and when you come to a dead stop, the car will stall if you don't depress the clutch pedal. There's another scene in the movie where they're discussing the events. The car pulls into the curb, and stalls.
This is a colloquial expression formed by analogy with other verbs that can partner with out. A candle wick can sputter out; it sputters as it goes out. The fuse on a dud firecracker fizzles out. A bad lightbulb flickers out. A clutch makes a kick, so it kicks out when it causes the car to stall.
It looks like motoring jargon. When the clutch is suddenly engaged and the car jerks. It can feel as if the car has been kicked, and in extreme cases can cause the car to flip, as suddenly a torque is applied through the gearbox. Do you drive a car with a manual clutch? As automatics don't have the same system, so you don't get the jerks that you can get with a manual clutch.
A clutch kick in modern car terminology is when you quickly disengage then re-engage the clutch with a quick kick to the clutch pedal. This allows the engine to rev momentarily, then when the clutch re-engages it will spin the wheels and induce oversteer.
A clutch kick is normally done intentionally in order to spin the car around on purpose, or otherwise get the car sideways on purpose, for example in rallying when being sideways is a more effective way to get around a corner, or more recently in drifting where being sideways around the corner is a core part of the sport.
Another way to initiate intentional oversteer is with a handbrake, so perhaps in the story mentioned it was being used as an equivalent to a hand brake turn (perhaps the kids were being pursued?).
To "clutch kick out" I would interpret as suggesting they "clutch kicked" (induced intentional oversteer) out of the situation, not that the clutch itself was kicked out, as that's not possible.
If it seems like they did in fact mean that the car was kicked out of gear (the car stalled or didn't move), then the book has it written incorrectly, and what they meant was that the gearbox was kicked out of gear. The clutch would have remained engaged in that scenario, but the transmission would be out of gear.
