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Most new model cars don’t even have a manual tranny as an option anymore. This proves Manuals are unsafe and outdated tech
It proves most people are too lazy to learn it. It's the same technology as in a semi or a motorcycle. Very much alive and well and something not everyone is smart or coordinated enough to learn.
There is a funny meme showing a stick shift and called it a Millennial Anti-Theft Device. Cracks me up every time I see it because I doubt many people under 30 know how to drive a stick. Both my kids, who are in their early 30's know how to drive a manual; it's what they learned on back when they started to drive.
All three of my kid's know and the oldest is 27. The 20 year old bought one on purpose so people wouldn't want to borrow her car! LOL
or like defusing a nuclear warhead, which is what some people seem to liken to driving a car with a manual transmission.
If they haved to think that hard about how to drive a manual throw in crank windows and a vent window, they would say how do people keep their minds on driving while trying to crank down a window this is to much to handle.
My brother is a truck driver and even though he drive an automatic he misses a standard. Me? I drove a standard once a long time ago. My uncle decided to take me out and teach me once in his VW Beetle. I did OK out of the gate, until.....I was coming up to my first stop and he told me to downshift. He never mentioned going down a gear at a time so at 40mph starting the downshifting process went from 4th to 1st and the VW stopped on a dime. That was it for me.
Your brain adjust and makes it almost involuntary. You just do it. I've never had anything but manual transmissions. It becomes like breathing.
Now that you have mentioned, something that's is also learned in a similar way is operating a backhoe, or even a grader. You have all these levers: to open/close the bucket, to lower/raise the boom, or to extend and retract the boom, and to swing the boom left/right. But once you have learned to operate the backhoe, you don't even think how you do the work because the boom and bucket are in your mind like an extension of your arms and hands. In fact, thinking about it slows you down, so you just do it. It's the same with a road grader (a bunch of levers used to control the grader, blade, and the rest, while still driving forward). And yes, nowadays there are some state of the art graders and dozers that incorporate a GPS system that allows you to set the grader's blade position and control it like an auto-pilot, but most aren't that way.
Track cars and drag cars are completely two different beasts. I'm from Detroit so the mention of "street racing" is generally the drag racing type. A fast street racing car , to me , would be mid to low 8's .
The McLaren 720 stock pulled an 8.9 with tire blankets under optimum conditions, on a strip.
If you'd said 9s it would be more credible. But you can't put an 8s car on the road and drive to a street meet without risking getting impounded before you get there, you need to run full drag tires or slicks, not street drags, and that's illegal in all 50 states.
I also used rotary-dial phone, hand-crank windows, and non-motorized push mowers.
However, I wouldn't want to go back to using any of those items.
Yes, those items operated as they were designed but they all had room for improvement.
Arguably, the automatic transmission was an improvement on the manual transmission because:
1) it is more reliable,
2) it reduces human labor (although it is minimal, shifting gears is still requires physical exertion), and
3) it allows for safer driving (even though you may be the exception, most people still take their eyes off the road to glance down when shifting gears and everyone takes a hand off the steering wheel or keeps a hand off the wheel for gear shifting, which is less safe than two-handed steering).
The original version of an item is not always its best iteration.
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