I'm a car enthusiast, and I was a manual transmission purist for many, many years. But then I had to be honest with myself, and admit that the VAST majority of my driving is commuting in traffic. And that driving is much less annoying with an automatic. My leisure driving is maybe 5% less fun without a manual, but that's far outweighed by how much better my daily commute is. At this point, I'd only buy a manual for a car that's not a daily driver.
I just spent two hours this morning in bumper to bumper traffic. In a diesel. With a manual. Shifting and clutching the entire time. All that monstrous low end torque just made the diesel want to take off the entire time.
Still I wouldn't change that for anything in the world. I always hated the lag between stepping on the gas pedal and the car beginning to move in the automatic. No clutch. That's no life, sucking all the enjoyment out of operating machinery.
It's insane. I visited my uncle in Petaluma and he drives a volt. He's normally a very slow driver (drives us insane ;), but one day we were running late to dinner (don't do that to my aunt...) so he decides to floor it (again, flooring it for him, so like 45 MPH) and that car just _took_ off.
I was very surprised at how much torque the car had. It's one thing to realize, "oh, yeah, of course electric cars have more torque because x, y, and z" but a completely different thing to be sitting in it when the car decides to go 20 MPH faster in a blink of an eye.
>I was very surprised at how much torque the car had.
The torque curve on EVs is awesome for sure; I can't wait to own one. But I'll bet that most people have never driven a ICE car with any real power or an automatic transmission tuned for acceleration as opposed to gas mileage. They also "take off" with minimal lag.
I had a similar "oh wow" experience when I discovered motorcycling, but eventually gave it up because I kept getting nearly hit by inattentive drivers. You pay dearly for that cost:performance ratio advantage over supercars, and the cost is safety.
I'm nearly hit by inattentive drivers on a daily basis. I've been riding bikes for so long that I just roll with it. I knew they were going to invade my space probably before they did because I read traffic ahead and to some degree predicted the possible outcomes.
But unfortunately that comes with time and experience. I've said in the past that if you can survive the first five years, you'll probably be pretty safe on a bike. I survived my first five years, despite of myself in retrospect, and the only time I've been down on asphalt was last year on a patch of black ice 400m from my garage. 35 years of not hitting pavement, only to be brought down by a stupid piece of slick road at 15mph.
I would never argue that a motorcycle is as safe as a car. For the youngsters under 25, I'm amazed that anyone survives, including myself. :-P But it's been mostly accident-free for me for 35 years. YMMV, in fact it probably will.
Haha, I agree re: under 25. I started cycling when I was 19; a motorcycle is a very intoxicating thing for a 19-year-old brain. I'm glad I survived. No accidents, but definitely some close calls.
The Volt isn't really an electric car, more of a hybrid - the gas engine is connected to the driveshaft, and the electric motor is only 82 hp. For a 3500 lb car, that's not much power. The Volt is IMO only marginally more "electric" than the Prius.
It is a similar experience, I'll give you that, but a LEAF (110 hp, 3300 lb) or Model S (300-700 hp, 4700 lb) will give you a much more exciting ride.
I drive the UK variant of the volt, and while it has good acceleration, it also has a variable lag from the pedal being fully depressed to the acceleration starting.
But no clutch, and no shifting. Just let off the accelerator for instant regenerative braking, and turn the wheel left-right. Acceleration isn't everything when driving; a clutch gives a car challenge, personality.
For me, driving without a dry clutch and without a shifter is no life.
I live in Silicon Valley and sit in nasty traffic daily in my manual transmission car. It's such second nature it doesn't even register.
A motorcycle is a different story. Holding the clutch in with your left hand gets downright painful after a while. Thankfully lane splitting is legal here.
I commuted about 1.5 hours/day in Southern California for 4-years in a manual transmission. Never once did it bother me.
Shifting in traffic becomes second nature, it's not some difficult thing that you have to think about.
The only challenge with a manual transmission is that it makes it harder to do stuff in your car with your hands, like eat a burrito, that you shouldn't be doing anyway.
I have semi-regular nightmares about getting stuck in eternal stop-and-go traffic on Storrow Drive in Boston on my motorcycle... The lanes are too narrow to lanesplit, there's nowhere to get off (it's a very limited access expressway and the exits are usually even worse) and people honk and swerve around you if you try to attain the average speed of the crowd by leaving a gap. Yeugh. My left hand hurts just thinking about it.
Disagree. I have been stuck in SV traffic for over a decade, on and off, with a stick shift. Even with the traffic I still don't hate them. When I really hate the traffic, I jump on a shitty motorcycle I bought on Craigslist.
I had to evacuate for a hurricane and spent more than 12 hours in stop-and-go traffic (traveling just over 100 miles). I did that in a manual transmission and vowed never to own one again.
Maybe not courteous, but at least attentive. If you're driving a manual in stop and go, it's hard to be playing with a cellphone (not that it doesn't happen). You are being forced to spend some thought on the act of driving, which I think is a good thing.
Manuals would probably shift driving away from the ignorant/nice/slow style of bad driving found in the southern US towards the attentive/aggressive style of bad driving found on the east coast. Definitely not more courteous, but probably more efficient and safer.
Definitely not. Check out any country that is not US for that. Not just Argentina or Brazil, but Europe too. Poland, for example.
(Personally I think everyone would be way more corteous and the roads would be safer if traffic laws were actually enforced. What I mean by that is e.g. ANPRs deployed pretty much everywhere, automatically fining you for speeding. The way most drivers I know treat traffic laws as mere suggestions is ridiculous.)
Manual transmission is incompatible with cruise control with proximity detection, because the automated system can't shift (or it would be an automatic transmission). I would buy a car which has both (like the Smart) and manual shift in difficult conditions (like driving over mountain passes in snow). However the Smart I rented didn't have a clutch. It's weird. I don't know.
While the use-cases for cruise control are more limited with a manual transmission, I wouldn't go as far as to say the two are incompatible.
I would never use it in heavy-traffic and rarely on a single-carriageway (i.e. anywhere that travelling at 60+ mph is a hazard), but if you're only switching between 4th and 5th, then it really is very useful
I don't know of anyone that uses ACC for city driving or non-motorway commute. This might be due to the nature of British roads, though
Me too. However I don't have proximity detection. I don't think this would be useful. Say you have traffic then the proximity detector will stall your engine.
I am using cruise control to stay exactly at the speed limit. In Switzerland there are sometimes long and boring stretches with low speed limits, and nasty traffic enforcement cams.
I think if it's annoying, you're not driving in traffic the right way. Sure, it's annoying for aggressive stop-and-go driving, but if you maintain a consistent speed with the traffic in front of you (see traffic shockwaves [0]), a manual transmission is better than an automatic.
> ... if you maintain a consistent speed with the traffic in front of you...
Good luck with that in CA. Whenever you ease off to anticipate a stop, you'll just get a bunch of jerks changing lanes in front of you to save a car-length or two.
I also drove a manual while commuting about 70 miles a day on the freeway.
I figured out that you can make manual driving as comfortable and carefree as automatic, but that type of driving typically wears on the clutch. For instance, you might just hold down the clutch in stop/go traffic if you don't know if you'll change gears or not. I was even pretty proficient at using my phone while driving with a manual but once again this involved a style of driving that wears out the clutch much quicker. The end result is you end up paying for a clutch replacement every 3-4 years which adds to the TCO of the car. After 7 years I'm switching back to an automatic and I don't think I'll miss my stick shift at all.
To the contrary, I find just popping it into neutral frequently is a much more comfortable way of handling stop-and-go than holding down the clutch all the time.
Do it right, and you don't even need to engage the clutch. Right when you let off the gas, pull the lever to neutral. If you're really good, and you're still rolling, you can give the throttle a little blip and put it right back into first w/o any clutch.
This is why I take the bus or train, even in towns where most people drive(when possible).
I used to commute from Downtown Hartford to the Airport. 20 minute drive, 40 minute bus ride. I showed up happy and refreshed and having had time to read, my coworkers showed up stressed out and miserable. I mean, I guess you save 20 minutes, but....
Not all places have trains, and not all buses are unpleasant. My rides in Hartford were all great. A lot of the anti-bus thing in America has some pretty ugly roots, but I'm not going to argue about it on HN.
At least in my experience, it's the bus itself that's unpleasant. Getting whipped side to side while the bus navigates streets it can barely fit on, loud creaking as every fastened component of the bus struggles for freedom as the structure of the bus flexes, and it's usually either too hot or too cold.
Add people to that and you've got a real grab bag.
I mean, sure, the relative safety of neighborhoods has some ugly roots too, but I'm not personally going to go live in a bad neighborhood just to prove a point.
Agree - I was the same for many years, always refusing to buy an automatic because I thought it would suck all the fun from driving. And like you, most of my driving was spent in traffic.
I eventually got an automatic, and I will never go back to manual! And if you get an automatic with 'flappy paddles', you can still have full control when you're not in traffic.
