my first car was a 93 honda civic, manual transmission. i loved that car, but as with most cars given to 16 year olds, i tore it up. it was still a good car, but i needed a newer one with all the traveling i was doing. having basically only driven stick shifts and feeling quite comfortable with the civic, i decided that i wanted basically the same thing. so i went around to various honda dealerships and found that there were very few sticks on the lot but an abundance of automatics.
are stick shifts beginning to be phased out? will i even be able to find them the next time i need to buy a new car? and how many of my generation of drivers can even drive them any more? (about half of my friends couldn’t get my car out of first gear to save their lives)
Nah dude, stickshifts are still available, and if you’re concerned about them losing popularity, just think for a second of what would happen to someone showin’ up to a street race with an automatic tranny.
Needless to say, I learned on an auto (when I was 16 in 1996), and then learned a stick when the car I got had one. When my SO at the time was getting her first car, I told her to get a stick, and that guys love girls that drive sticks. My future wife will drive a stick as a requirement, and any daughters I sire will learn as well.
Also, think about all the high-end sports cars. There’s a reason why they only come with standard transmissions.
In reality, yes, stick shiftss are becoming rare in the US. High-end sports cars will still have them, but not too much else. I bought a 2001 Ford Ranger (pick-up truck for the unknowing) and I found exactly 1 with a stick (the one I bought). The dealer also found three others in a tri-state search (I’m in PA). Granted, this was at a time the 2002 model year was coming out, but a couple of the dealerships I went to said that they had not recieved any Rangers w/ a stick in the 2001 model year.
I have many friends who are unable to drive stick. They learn on an automatic and let it go at that.
i looked around the nashville, tn area when i was searching. it wasn’t that there weren’t stick shifts… it’s just that my options in color and interior and such were limited. if i was going to get the exact car that i wanted i would have had to have the dealership order it. it’s kinda hard to talk some one down in price on something that they don’t have to get rid of in the first place. there ended up being only one car on the lot that was a stick and not one of those light silvery type colors. it wasn’t my first choice on color, but it’s the one i ended up with.
also, as i walk to classes, i tend to amuse my curiosity by looking to see how many stick shifts there actually are around. it seems that almost all of them are automatics. those that are stick tend to be older foreign made cars. there also seems to be a trend that there are more imports which are stick shifts than domestic(especially with older models). is this true? if so, why?
Public preference.
The stick shift is still around though - Caddillac (sp?) released the CTS last year and it has an available stick, which is a big deal for a Caddy. They felt it was necessary for the car to be seen as appropriately sporty.
I remember reading that in Europe, 1 in 12 cars is an automatic, whereas in the US, 1 in 9 cars is a stick.
I drive a stick. I just like it, and I also like the improved performance, economy and control I get over an autotmatic.
There is a positive feedback between automatic transmission and stop signs. When I was growing up, stop signs were relatively uncommon (and 4-way stops banned, in PA) and stick shifts were common. As time wore on, stick shifts became relatively rare and stop signs became ubiquitous–including situations where there was no reason whatever to stop and they were clearly being used only to slow people down. Most 4-way stops are pointless. The other reason they are used is to force drivers to yield to pedestrians (and indeed they are less used on the west coast where drivers DO yield to pedestrians). All those useless stop signs are a major pain if you are driving a stick shift. They are also a significant waste of gas, of break linings and a significant source of pollution. All because people will not slow down and in most places will not yield to pedestrians. Also it used to be that automatic transmission themselves wasted a lot of gas, but I think that is less of a problem today. In Europe stop signs are rather rare (yield signs are common, though) and pedestrian crossings are mostly obeyed, although not as rigourously as on the west coast and there are far fewer automatic transmissions, although they are not unknown. The pain of driving through these stop sign forests may well drive me to getting automatic for my next car, although I have driven a manual for nearly 50 years. So the stop signs encourage people to drive automatics and the automatics encourage people to put up with the stop signs.
In the last 3 months I’ve bought 3 brand new cars (I got a huge raise at work:cool: , and it was time for all of us to get new cars anyway) I bought a Mustang GT, and a Suzuki XL7, both stick. I bought my son a Ford ZX-2 which is an automatic, but it usually comes standard in stick (in fact 5 speed stick was the standard for all these vehicles, automatic was an option). I see no indication that (at least in the U.S.) stick shift is being fazed out. It’s just that a lot of people take the automatic option more often these days.
Well some of the real high end sports cars are coming with paddle shifts that were developed for Formula One and WRC racing. If these types, with their computer controlled clutch and shift systems, continue to get cheaper you may see the loss of the ‘stick’. You’ll still be able to change gears when you want to but you probably won’t be using a clutch and the shifter may move to the steering wheel where Formula One and (some) WRC cars have them. That’s not even considering the new Continuously Variable Transmission on some new cars (Volkswagen IIRC).
Oh, come on, guys! The U.S. auto industry is one of the most statistic-obsessed around. Surely someone can come up with a statistic like, “in 2002, X percent of the Y autos and light trucks sold in the U.S. had manual transmissions. This compares to Z percent of the AA autos and light trucks sold 10 years before.”
Another reason to keep manual cars in the catalog is price. You can advertise a car for $1000 less than most people will actually end up paying. Same deal with the fuel efficiency.
Speaking as a 19 year-old male, I’d have to say that while stick shift is not in the majority, they are not rare either. Everyone I know that has any sort of dreams of making their vehicle faster has a manual (mostly guys with Hondas), and probably 75% of people who see their car as nothing more than transportation have auto. I drive a manual, and probably will continue to do so, for a couple of reasons. First, when I got my license, all the cars in the family were manual. Second, I hate how much automatics allow your speed to increase when going down a hill off the gas. Third, manual is just more fun.
And, just for the record, Wyld Stallyn is dead on about guys liking girls that drive manual, provided they’re not bad at it.
With a lockup torque converter and the new 6 speed auto that BMW(? I think) came out with, there’s hardly any reason for automatics to perform significantly worse than sticks; there’s one reason right there. Also, with traffic jams becoming worse on a daily basis, having a stick can be a curse.
That being said, it appears that most foreign manufacturers (Mercedes Benz and other luxury makes like Lexus & Infiniti being notable exceptions, although that only applies to the US) still offer sticks as standard in most base model cars. Honda still offers it on the top of the line Accord (Toyota is a bit more conservative, offering it only in the lower and sport Camrys).
Bought a 2003 Sonoma recently, or I should say, GM is allowing me to make payments for 5 years. It’s a five-on-the-floor. I don’t think there’s any problems getting a shift if you want one.
Let’s not forget the huge mark-up on the price of a new car with an auto tranny. The dealers make more bucks with it. When you see a car advertised at a low price, odds are the small print will say standard transmission.
