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It looks really hard and unsafe to drive a manual. How do you know which gears to shift while driving and how do you make sure you shift correctly while keeping your eyes on the road and hands on steering wheel? It looks like driving manuals is hard work, do people actually enjoy driving a manual?
Driving a manual is unsafe only if you don't know what you're doing. It takes practice, but you learn the feel of the car and where the gears are. It's not hard. At all.
As for enjoying - yes. I enjoy it very much. I'll drive a stick until my left knee/ankle and/or my right shoulder give out.
An added bonus - a standard transmission is a terrific anti-theft device.
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Originally Posted by Truth11
It's impractical and archaic.
Do tell. What's impractical about a stick, and what's archaic about a simple automobile transmission?
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Originally Posted by Truth11
Not fun for me...too complicated.
LMAO. You poor thing.
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Originally Posted by NewUser
I learned to drive a manual transmission car back when I was 16. It was my dad's 1975 Chevy Chevette.
Wow. That's doing it the hard way! Those clutches were really stiff, if I recall from driving a friend's Chevette.
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Fast forward 40 years and I have never owned a car with an automatic transmission. I enjoy shifting myself, and modern cars have added "hill-grabber" clutches so that you don't drift backwards when starting out on a hill.
Only my first car - partially funded by my dad - was an automatic. Ever since then, I've driven standards - and I loooooove the 6-speed transmission on my 2015 Mazda3. Although it does have the hill-grabber feature - how disappointing! No more scaring the crap out of the driver behind me when I roll back for a split second! LOL
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Originally Posted by Airborneguy
How did this obvious troll post go 23 pages?
Because you have people who have failed to learn to operate a standard transmission throwing shade on people who enjoy driving a standard transmission, with the resulting pushback. Welcome to C-D!
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Originally Posted by Truth11
It was a different time...automatics started becoming more popular after a certain time.
Automatics have been around since the 1940s. Maybe earlier. Yet the standard transmission endures.
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I don't recall driver's ed in school even offering the option of learning on manual.
Downshifting without rev-matching (i.e. using a lower gear to help slow your car down) isn't good for your clutch, and is unsettling to the driveline - and any passengers. Similarly, using the clutch to hold your car on a hill will wear out your clutch and its components very quickly (not to mention wear out your left leg). Perhaps "harm" is a bit strong of a term, but it's not good for the longevity of the clutch and/or transmission. Cars have brakes for a reason. It's a hell of a lot easier (and less expensive) to replace a few brake pads every 50k miles than it is to replace a clutch every 100k.
I drove big trucks, dump trucks, and even graders that had manual transmissions, and never had trouble wearing out the cloth. Downshifting was the norm for me and my coworkers, and using the brakes was minimal. The idea was to downshift using the right gear to coast or slow down to the red light, and the brake to stop moving. However, with the transmissions that had synchronized gears, one does not always have to use the clutch to shift once the truck is moving from a stop. The only ones non of my coworkers and I could downshift was the AC 3-speed grader transmission. That grader was manual all the way, and to upshift we had to double-clutch.
Even my wife driving a Civic had around 200,000 miles on it without a clutch replacement
Location: The Circle City. Sometimes NE of Bagdad.
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Originally Posted by NewUser
Perhaps people who are not good at driving a car with a manual transmission in a hilly location? Obviously it must have been an issue for some people as this feature exists on my current car, and I think that I used to hear it being advertised by Subaru before they switched to CVTs.
My 1939 Studebaker had this feature, they called a hill holder. Worked good.
Right there just sounds like too much going on...rather than just 1)Get in vehicle 2)Start vehicle 3)Go;
I had a friend try to teach me in his Honda when I was 16...kept bucking etc. Lesson over.
You might as well say its too difficult to steer a car because you have to turn the wheel. Billions of people around the world drive manuals with no problem whatsoever so it can't be that difficult.
It looks really hard and unsafe to drive a manual. How do you know which gears to shift while driving and how do you make sure you shift correctly while keeping your eyes on the road and hands on steering wheel? It looks like driving manuals is hard work, do people actually enjoy driving a manual?
It looks really hard and unsafe to drive a manual. How do you know which gears to shift while driving and how do you make sure you shift correctly while keeping your eyes on the road and hands on steering wheel? It looks like driving manuals is hard work, do people actually enjoy driving a manual?
It becomes intuitive very quickly. And yes, driving a manual is much more fun than automatic. As for automatics with manual mode - meh. I've had several cars with this feature and its not even close to the real thing.
It looks really hard and unsafe to drive a manual. How do you know which gears to shift while driving and how do you make sure you shift correctly while keeping your eyes on the road and hands on steering wheel? It looks like driving manuals is hard work, do people actually enjoy driving a manual?
Try learning on a semi. I had a good grasp of manual shifting, but when you start training on semi's, you get 9-10-13 and even 20 (With 4 speed brownie) gears to play with or destroy....
Only my first car - partially funded by my dad - was an automatic. Ever since then, I've driven standards - and I loooooove the 6-speed transmission on my 2015 Mazda3. Although it does have the hill-grabber feature - how disappointing! No more scaring the crap out of the driver behind me when I roll back for a split second! LOL
I actually rested on the bumper of someone who wouldn't give me space. I kept rolling back to let them know they needed to give me a few more inches, and every time I moved back up, they would too. I finally ran out of room and figured I may as well save my brakes and clutch. What can I say? I was young AND stupid. But the look on their face was worth it (this was in the days of bumpers with bumper guards)
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Originally Posted by MnM258
You might as well say its too difficult to steer a car because you have to turn the wheel. Billions of people around the world drive manuals with no problem whatsoever so it can't be that difficult.
When my old car had yet another power steering issue (both hoses failed in 6 years and I managed to find the last ones in the country), then the pump went and the remanufactured one was even worse, I told my mechanic I was just going to convert it to manual steering. He thought I was nuts! The only thing that stopped me was that I needed a manual rack plus the parts to connect it. I had the rack but I couldn't find the rest. To me, it was better than dealing with another breakage with parts that were hard to find.
I learned to drive an automatic first. Learning to drive a manual happened a few years later, so it was easy. Learning all at once would have been intimidating but people used to do that all the time. It wouldn’t scare me off.
Also, I already knew the rules of the road from years of cycling. Adding in the operation of an automatic and later a stick shift made the transitions minor steps up.
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