Ravenwood - 12/08/04 06:00 AM
Manual trannies are almost dead.
...today, more than 90 percent of all new cars and nearly as many new trucks are equipped with automatics. In the past few years, the percentage of new vehicles sold in the United States with manual transmissions has slipped from 19.9 percent to 11.1 percent.I learned on a stick shift and drove one pretty much up until I sold the Mustang for a more practical SUV. While I still love the power and responsiveness of a stick, I wouldn't downgrade from an automatic unless I went back to driving a sports car. (Which I'll probably never do.) Even when I had a sports car, I hated riding the clutch and shifting gears in stop-n-go traffic. It's great for taking first place out of the toll booth, but sucks for your daily commute.
Perhaps one of the biggest appeals of driving a manual was the prestige. Even though they were more common back then, in high school only a few of us even knew how to drive a manual. In fact, when a friend of mine got a car with a stick shift for his 16th birthday, his parents left it up to us to teach him how to drive it.
I would bet that now most kids today are never even taught to drive a manual and would probably have a tough time getting one started much less moving. And lets see them try to find the reverse gear on a VW Rabbit or figure out how to operate the "glow plugs" on a diesel.
I am pleased to say that when I taught my daughter to drive, she wanted to learn to drive a manual, and when she purchased her first new car, it too is a manual.
That's my girl!
Posted by: Kevin Baker at December 8, 2004 9:22 AMHEH.
My first car was a manual 1979 Mercedes 240D.
Diesel glow plugs and the screwed up German manual reverse in one package, baby! The thing was a tank.
One problem with this trend though is that Americans who travel overseas will have a much more difficult time finding rental cars. In Europe, automatics are still a relative rarity and the surcharge to rent an automatic is oten times substantial.
Posted by: countertop at December 8, 2004 10:42 AMWhat's really sad is that the young whippersnappers nowadays don't know how to start a car with the good old-fashioned manual crank. Sad, sad, sad.
Posted by: Thibodeaux at December 8, 2004 2:16 PMManuals are out there, although sometimes hard to find. And they save you money, not just in better mpg but also at purchase time, as the car dealers stick you $500 or more for the automatic. Oh, and every automatic breaks down sooner or later; manuals might need a clutch around 100K miles. As for riding a clutch, with today's hydraulic clutches its a breeze. The days of having an overmuscled left leg are long gone. We have 3 cars and a stick in each of them. I wouldn't have any auto tranny for all the tea in china.
Or push start and pop the clutch.
Posted by: Ravenwood at December 8, 2004 3:01 PMI'll teach you how on "Your" clutch, not on mine. Just Damn!
Posted by: Dax Montana at December 8, 2004 6:21 PMEveryone should learn how to handle a clutch, but forget it for city or suburban driving. I loved driving an MG Midget in Hawaii, but you have to be a purist to prefer it over an automatic in normal traffic. Too much work.
signed,
Getting Old
PS: Push start is a good selling point, but again a mostly youthful need.
Posted by: mikem at December 8, 2004 11:17 PMWe don't own anything but manual vehicles, so when my kids wanted to learn to drive, they had to drive a stick or nothing. When one of my daughters took her driving test last year, the examiner said that in 8 years, she was only the second person to take the test in a stick. (It was a pickup with a cap too, and she did fine on the parallel parking ;-)
Posted by: Dan at December 8, 2004 11:35 PMDan,
You mean they still teach parallel parking? When I took my test back in the late 1980s it had already gone the way of the dodo. They didn't even teach it in driver's ed.
Posted by: Ravenwood at December 9, 2004 7:27 AMIt was a good thirty years ago that I read of the gang who hijacked a diamond courier's car and then found that they were unable to drive it.
Posted by: triticale at December 9, 2004 8:41 PM(c) Ravenwood and Associates, 1990 - 2014
