That brings back memories! When I took Drivers’ Education, we used the ever-popular Aetna Drive-O-Trainer simulators. Part of one week’s session was manual shifting. We were taught to shift into first gear by gripping the shift level with palm toward us and pulling toward us and down; then reversing the hand, palm facing away and fingers uncurled, and pushing up and away to get to second; and then using the same hand orientation and pushing away and down for third. This was supposed to keep us from shifting into the wrong gear accidentally.
After that, I drove a manual transmission car exactly once, and it had a floor shifter. IIRC, I was about 20, so it would have been about six years after that instructional episode (I got my license at 14 - ah, Kansas!). My mother, my brother, and I went to visit some friends who went camping every weekend, and on the way home Mom got sick, so I had to driver her VW Rabbit. I handled the interstate highway and all the hilly streets in Topeka with no trouble. However, I did stall it once - in the driveway at home.
Same here, but Wichita. I wish I had the license still. They literally had to point the camera downward to get my photo, and the bottom of the pulldown screen was about shoulder level.
Our driver’s ed had simulators, but only one big screen in the classroom – and no stickshift training except one day to learn out in the field. It wasn’t until I was about 17 that a veteran co-worker taught me to drive a stick with his 70s Nissan pickup.
exactly, it doesn’t make any sense. i wouldn’t buy such a thing but apparently car companies found folks that would. did they find enough people to justify starting a manufacturing line? dunno. but i have been reading that car companies are open to producing manual EVs if there are enough weird people to buy them.
They’ll win races, but will they draw crowds? I haven’t been to a proper drag race, but I’m told that a huge part of the thrill is the sensory overload from the roaring engines. Noise you can feel.
Or are the crowds not a huge part of the business? i.e. is there more money in broadcast / distribution related revenue?
That’s entirely a generational thing. Teenage EV enthusiasts today wax excitedly about the whine of inverters and debate the merits of three phase power frequencies.
The fans of the future will view us as the same dinosaurs that we burned in our dirty, inefficient, planet murdering Flintstone cars.
The notion that ICE cars are objectively cooler or more exciting is silly and close-minded.
Don’t worry, for people like us, ICE won’t go away. It’ll become a niche hobby like horses did when cars came along. Nothing ever goes away, it just gets added to the pile of things people like to do.
I thought the same thing but it only took me about 10 mins of missing gears and banging my right hand on the door panel looking for a missing stick shift over outside the car to get it. If you daily a manual, you’ll be fine in short order.
Well that’s good they have different starters etc. I wouldn’t think they wouldn’t take the different needs into consideration. Though I have two mechanic friends who tell met about all of the poorly designed parts they repeatedly see fail in certain models, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was an issue in some.
I get the point of reducing run time when idling; makes sense. I’ve never used that feature and so if it was more or less seamless when driving, it sounds like a decent system. Do you have to do any shifting or is it automatic?
I guess when someone says “turns off automatically”, I envisioned it with an old car I used to have that would do this sometimes - and it wasn’t a feature! Putting in park, cranking it once or twice, put back in drive, just to die at the next light. I’m sure the system works better than that. As you said, “BMW’s is insufferable.”, so maybe the feature is infuriating on some models.
My “new” car I got last year is a 2010. So maybe this is a feature to look forward to next time I get a “new” one.
Never driven a BMW car, but have ridden BMW motorcycles. Like a cubist painting, they are a weird irregular hodge-podge of features. And the features either make for smooth and seamless riding (heated hand grips! hard braking without nose-diving!) or are insufferable (those fscking turn indicators! selling an engine with the cylinders outside the frame, and selling crash bars separately!)
