We should also get rid of starter motors. Who needs them? We can just hand crank the car to start it, like real men did back in the day.
I love when it backfires and accidentally breaks your arm! So manly!!!
As someone that literally spent 25 years driving a manual, including various stints in racing. Manuals have seen their day.
It used to be if you wanted better mileage, you drove a manual. If you wanted to be faster on the track, drive a manual (caveat there is drag racing.)
Today? The computer is just better at controlling a transmission. I drive a Camry Hybrid now and not having shifts is REALLY weird and the drone getting up to highway speeds is annoying, but I do like the 45mpg. Not to mention, when I sat down to learn how the Toyota Hybrid Drive works… It’s a pretty clever system.
There are a lot of times that nostalgia gets the better of me and I wish I had a car with a manual. My oldest is possibly joining a skating team that is a 2 hour drive away. It’s tempting to let him use my car and then buy an older manual for myself as a toy. I’d love to get a hold of another mid-80’s Corolla GT-S. I autocrossed one back in the late 80’s early 90’s. It still remains my favorite car I’ve ever owned.
Same here . Obviously it does feel more like actually driving a car instead of a toy but to be honest, electric is here and they don’t shift. Today when i feel like doing some driving for the sake of driving- a motorcycle is much more fun anyway.
PUT IT IN “H”
What country is this car from?
She’ll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene.
During Covid, I put together a budget sim rig. Played a looooot of VR Assetto Corsa. Learned to drive a manual, then went and did a manual Porsche race car on a track in Vegas. It worked! It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I was flushed when I got out of the car. It was overwhelming.
Anyway, I was ready. So I took the natural next step. I bought a manual 1984 Ford F-250 with a ~7L (7.4L?) engine, dual gas tanks that held more fuel than I could ever afford. It was a beast. Long story short, I was not ready. Oh, did I mention I lived in mountainous Utah at the base of said mountains at the time?
Yeah pre year ~2000 cars are a bit different lmao
my uncle learned driving with a manual and he said it scared the shit out of him because anytime he went up a hill hed start going backwards trying to get to the next gear 😭
This is a tip for people that don’t drive automatic transmission, if you ever try it, put it in R and really floor it. The R stands for racing mode!
I hate the knob. I can’t decide if that or the Nissan “orb of motion” as Garbage Time put it is my least favourite. I miss my manual car, but I’m on the electric train now, as computery as it gets.
Ours has a stick configuration. Fellow Frank supporter
I bought a new 2024 vehicle last year with a manual transmission. This will be the last manual I ever own. I don’t expect them to be around by the next time I get a car.
I’ve enjoyed driving stick since I was a teenager. It still makes my commute more enjoyable. A good rev matched downshift still makes me smile. I’m going to miss the experience when it finally comes to an end, but hopefully I can keep it up another 20 years.
Funnily enough, I have a few friends who really think like this. Personally, having driven manual for 20 years before I switched to electric a year ago, I don’t see it, apart from a certain comfortable nostalgia. Automatic is better in cities and it’s a lot easier for kids to learn. Handbrake starts on hills? What a weird thing to be nostalgic about.
I suspect it’s just these people think handling the gearstick makes them special. It’s the one thing they can be smug about,completely discounting the fact that any old idiot can learn to drive manual if they just practice a bit. Reminds me of my grandpa who insisted that it’s better to chop down trees with an axe and a handsaw, instead of using these modern chainsaws. He was a stubborn old dude.
Good insight, it really is basically “if you get rid of this, then I won’t be good at anything”
Electric cars have no transmission. If you buy electric, there are no stick shifts because electric cars only have one gear (with very few exceptions, and even then you’d just have 2 gears.)
Idk how this plays into the joke, but it’s a neat fact.
Technically they have at least 2 “gears”, forward and reverse. But does it really count if all you do is shout at the angry pixies to run the other way?
Manual is hell for people with back or knee issues.
Clutches are for the weak. Grind em till you find em.
Person with back and knee issues here: worth it to not have to deal with a slushbox that won’t downshift when I need it to. I’ll never give up my manual.
Eh, automatic cars will let you go into “manual” mode in which you tell it when to switch the gears. Mildly useful for steep hills to stop it from switching back and forth in some rare scenarios.
Not every automatic has that. Not to mention that there tends to be input lag when you hit the paddle, and there’s the fact that they won’t hold a gear when you need them to (instead they tend to automatically upshift right before redline). Manual mode is no substitute for a real manual.
Even the oldest automatics would let you lock it to a lower gear if you needed it.
Just curious, what kind of terrain did you encounter that seem to cause such issues with wrongly shifting gears?
Flat asphalt.
Like for example when you need to accelerate quickly to get around/avoid something. Most automatics I’ve driven will often shift into second too soon unless you drive aggressively, and absolutely refuse to drop back down to first gear—no matter how hard you stomp the accelerator pedal—even if there’s still plenty of room left in the rev range.
You can usually change the driving mode from eco over comfort to sport. They all behave differently. And the there’s the kick down, that’ll definitely shift down unless the revs would be too high.
I love driving manual, have done it since I was 18. But automatic transmissions nowadays are really good.
The only ones I’ve driven will not shift when you kick the gas pedal down, precisely to let you accelerate faster.
Yeah I’ve got regular back and ankle issues. It’s annoying when they flare up but really not that bad. Unfortunately manuals are harder and harder to find so this will likely be my last
Manuals are infinitely more fun to drive and I like to manipulate the performance characteristics of the car myself but they’re probably going extinct to EV which is fine.
Not just EVs, modern beltless CVTs and automatic transmissions make manual transmissions practically obsolete. With a wider set of gear ranges and way better performance and reliability they’re better in almost every way than a stick shift. That said, doesn’t matter how good a transmission is if it’s undersized for the engine, so I’m not say the transmission in any particular vehicle is good, just the tech has developed in recent years
those transmissions are only better on paper. sure they could be theoretically better but in practice the transmission programming is to way over aggressively upshift in order to miser out a little more fuel economy on paper (but in practice they waste fuel)
True, and as someone who’s been driving the same stick shift for almost 15 years now, you can take it from my cold dead hands. I haven’t seen anything with a beltless cvt, and I haven’t seen an automatic transmission I like more than my five speed, except in traffic. The tech exists, although it’s not available.
Waste fuel, and they don’t always do what you want them to do, or sometimes lag before they do it.
Wife owns an automatic, it’s fantastic for when you’re stuck in traffic, but GOD does it make shitty decisions. Of course it cannot anticipate whether or not you’re going to be climbing a slope, so it goes up a gear, but then when it struggles to climb it has to immediately go back down a gear, but you lost all speed already and it’s raining and you can’t pick up traction again so you slide back down the slope and try again. It’s also only really effective for the most tranquil driving, and it has a huuuuuuge inertia when accelerating, like a good half second of not obeying your pedaling, which is 1.frustrating and 2.dangerous in situations where you have to get out of the way urgently. So, would only recommend for old people or people frequently stuck in traffic. The technology has ways to go still
Check your owners manual to see if you have a button to disable “overdrive”, it’s for adverse conditions such as uphill or downhill, off-road or rainy, etc. It prevents the shifting up too early and gives each gear more range to operate in. By default it’s on because it saves fuel, and they make the button hard to find sometimes.
There is in fact something like this, never tried it. Thanks for the tip
I drove one of the first semi trucks with an automatic transmission, and that thing was dangerous. It would pop me out of gear going down hill, thank fuck the brakes held out. The reverse gear could either roll the rig back at 10 inches per hour, or 10mph, and not much in-between.
Was nice being able to sip a coffee through traffic tho
That must have been a while ago, I assume trucks got auto transmissions before consumer cars ?
No, much later. Transmissions in trucks work differently and have to withstand so much more stress. Wasn’t till the early 00’s that anyone got serious about them.
They’ve been around since the 50’s, but only became widespread in 2010ish. I think Volvo started offering the first production model auto trucks in 06.
Wow ! more ancient than I thought
Automatic transmissions have been around since the 60’s or 50’s, IIRC.
Damn. Ours doesn’t behave that way.
Maybe it’s the brand. It’s a Hyundai
You’re like a solid 20 years behind here bud, they don’t even offer manual transmissions on high end luxury cars. People don’t buy them. I get it, I miss having manual cars, and it’s not as hard as people always complained, I could teach a dog to drive manual over the phone, it’s really not hard.
That’s not true. Honda selled more manual than automatic cars in the past year.
they don’t even offer manual transmissions on high end luxury cars
Honda
Hmm.
No they have a pretty solid point here, the expensive Honda are selling majority manual, the budget friendly Honda sell close to zero, but you can often only get manual on those models by paying for multiple upgrades that push the price so close to the more expensive models you would clearly just move up.
There are plenty of cars offering manual transmission, its just not available for every CSR out there. If you want to have fun with it you can.
You’ll never catch me doing something that can be automated away, this includes shifting gears in a car.
But a car is just a tool to me, like a cordless drill, so i’m sure I don’t get it.
As a programmer, I am more than happy automating a task for which I will never recoup my automation time investment.
It’s the principle of the thing.
as a senior programmer (with limited, valuable time), i exercise good judgement before wasting weeks on unused automations.
“measure twice, cut once” as the craftsmen used to say. or YAGNI
It’s not like you can use that time freed by automating gear shifting for something else.
It’s a tool, yes, but personally, I like having more control over tools I use. I’d choose a cordless drill that I can set the torque control myself over one that doesn’t have that option.
It doesn’t free up time no but it does make driving ever so slightly less involved.
Controls on a drill have a clear practical purpose, and to my knowledge they don’t make them that do that automatically in a reasonable price range. I would totally buy that if they did. ;-)
and by making driving less involved, we free up drivers to play on their phones while going 70mph down the highway. progress!
Yeah. People in a manual definately don’t ever do that.
I totally understand people who like the whole ritual of the manual car. Hell, that’s how I feel about music making. But there’s something to be said for just getting something to happen without much effort.
Just because you need to learn something additional does not mean driving a manual requires more effort in any substantial way. Its more effort than 0, but it is not taxing or hard to drive a manual when you are used to it. I do not think about pushing the clutch in or shifting, I just do it.
I will say dont ever drive a manual if you will be in stop and go traffic for long periods of time regularly though. Im personally never in it.
Pretty much every consumer in every auto market agrees with you. There are downsides to manual, you can grind a transmission’s gears to dust in a couple of days if you do it wrong, you really can’t trust someone to drive your car at all, you are much more actively driving, so you’re paying more attention, but you’re also more stressed, if you’re in bumper to bumper traffic, you will have to do the most difficult aspects of driving every few seconds to inch along for a half hour or more and that’s REALLY shitty, if you need to stop on any kind of hill, you have to be aware your gonna need half a car length or more to get into gear where your just going to be falling down that hill while you convince yourself you don’t need to panic and you will catch the gear before you’re past the point of no return. You get better mileage, you get better control, you pay attention more, you focus more, but it’s not all roses, the risks usually aren’t worth it for modern car buyers.
your gonna need half a car length or more to get into gear
my arsehole just clenched tight for any car you’ve ever driven. eugh. you let a car fall back half a car length before the biting point? that’s literally a ton of pressure on it. you’re way better off giving too much gas and too little clutch than letting the car fall half a length backwards bro. the former will perhaps stress your clutch slightly but it won’t fuck with your gears like the latter
like a chinese burn vs a broken bone
I mostly drove manual in a very mountainous geography.
Soo… that means you had room behind your car, so you we’re never forced to learn how to do it without letting the car move.
Try an uphill start with shitty winter tires in traffic when the car barely stays still with your brakes on while you’re stopped at a 30 degree incline in lights.
You learn that it’s better to slightly antagonise the clutch (we call it “pissing” the clutch, but “bullshitting” would be a more accurate translation as per the meaning of “kusettaa”.) So youre sort of “cheating”, but what you can’t do is let the car move backwards.
Not only does it make it way worse for the gearbox, it also ruins your chances at having traction in a scenario such as I described.
In Finland you literally have to spend a day on slippery course before getting your permanent licence. It’s ice and water in the winter and oil and soap in the summer. And there too, the instructors may be like, “hey stop here on this uphill.”
Also, whenever doing conscription and driving military trucks in a convoy, you really can’t let the vehicle fall half a length.
That’s just bad driving.
I’m sure you’re a good manual driver… for an American.
Starting on a slope isn’t particularly hard, you have to make use of the handbrake
somebody failed to read the meme i guess, it’s literally right there
Not saying you’re wrong in general but
if you need to stop on any kind of hill, you have to be aware your gonna need half a car length or more to get into gear where your just going to be falling down that hill while you convince yourself you don’t need to panic and you will catch the gear before you’re past the point of no return
My shitty Toyota Aygo has a hill start assist thing and it works very well. Basically when you release the brake at 0 km/h it holds it for a few seconds or until you reach the slip point of your first gear. Also handbrake start is right there in the OP, (and a mandatory part of drivers ed over here)
