In 1992, my then-16 year old daughter took her driver’s license driving test in my straight drive Mazda 626. She was the only one in her group of friends and acquaintances who knew how to drive a stick. Her boyfriends were so jealous she could drive her brother’s MG and they couldn’t. (Of course, she knew --as they didn’t-- that everything that fell off that car was of Genuine British Manufacture.) Even her older brother (who rebuilt his MG with my husband’s help) took his driving test in an automatic transmission car.
These days none of my grandchildren (3 in college, one a senior in high school) know how to drive a stick and they don’t care to learn. It’s a shame since I think they won’t get to enjoy the feeling of power under one’s feet with a manual transmission.
I learned how to drive on a manual transmission, but I do admit that I might get tripped up trying to steal a car with a column shifter since I’ve never used one of those before:
I was lucky that my very first car that I learned on was a stick shift. If not for that, I probably never would have learned. I may never use that skill again now, but it already came in handy a couple times during college.
Whenever I travel to France, I don’t even bother trying to rent an automatic. I’ve been lied to by rental car companies too many times over the years, and have no desire to pay for the damage I would cause to a manual transmission.
Never learned to drive stick, but I have vague plans of taking lessons. Some driving schools have a training car with manual transmission for this purpose!
My first car, a 1979 Accord, had a . . . semiautomatic transmission? A service guy once called it an “Australian transmission.”
It was automatic – no clutch – but there were two ranges of gears that you had to manually shift between. I forget if the gap was between 2 and 3 or 3 and 4. As you accelerated you listened for the motor to rev, then you pulled on shifter.
Manual transmission cars are getting harder to find these days even if you’re willing to pay extra. Just sold my 2000 sedan to a neighbor whose 16 year old son wanted a stick shift. Put over 300,000 miles on that car with just one clutch replacement.
I purposefully sought an older Toyota pickup with manual transmission, crank up windows and manual door locks - less complexity when things break. The clutch is a beast however - stiff and hard like a high school kid at a strip club.
I drive many different vehicles each day, swapping between auto and manual boxes, and it’s easy to forget when going from a manual ’box to an auto, and press hard on the brake pedal…
It’s worse when you have an audience…
I remember VW Beetles were easy to learn with, because they’d take an amazing amount of punishment from awkward learners. The only hard part was how hard you had to vertically push down on the stickshift to get it into reverse…
Stick shift? Easy-peasy-lemon-squeasy. You should try my old Ford Cortina automatic choke. You got one go at starting it, then it flooded, and you had a 20 minute wait.
Trust me, after a 30 minutes’ driving an auto around town your left foot will chillax naturally. It’s getting your right foot to hold the brake when stationary that needs concentrating on.
And it’s a brake pedal, for braking (not for breaking things)
Ah, yes, German reverse. My 2002 Jetta TDi wagon has that, and it has befuddled several people who claimed to be able to drive a manual. Not if they can’t back it out of the garage…
It’s approaching 200k miles, original clutch, no paperclips or rubber bands needed so far.
I dread switching to an automatic when the sad day of replacing this old workhorse arrives.
