An advantage to knowing how to drive a stick if you travel: It’s significantly cheaper to rent a manual transmission vehicle outside of the US.
Yes, they are. I’ve never driven one, and I know maybe three people who own one. Driving a stick is a basic necessity for anyone involved with cars, around here. Automatics are gaining ground, but they sure have a long way to go. Us Euros will have robot cars before the stick shift is phased out.
Actually I think double clutch automatics will take over from manuals. I drive one now and there just isn’t any reason to drive a manual any more. They have all the advantages. The only thing is expense and that will come down as they become standard.
They’re very uncommon over here (France). My mother is the only person I know who owns an automatic (she learned to drive after she retired. It’s a different driving license for automatic cars and stick, so it was easier for her). And her car is the only automatic car I ever sat in (and I’m 49). The only other person I’ve known who envisioned buying one was the 89 yo father of my ex (again because it was assumed it would be easier to drive for him, given his age). They’re that uncommon. In fact I didn’t know automatic cars existed before my mother passed her driving license.
Let me just add that if I were living in Europe, I would prefer driving a stick. Here (in Montreal, which is even worse than the US as far as I can tell) we live in a stop sign forest and driving a stick is a PITA. I finally gave up with my last car and bought an automatic. In Europe, stop signs are rare, but serious. There are some yield signs. Even traffic lights are less common, even in big cities. Roundabouts are common though. So driving a stick is a pleasure. The half dozen times I rented a car in Europe, I don’t think automatics were even available, except by special arrangement. Learning to shift left-handed in England was an experience, but I adjusted quickly.
In PA, where I grew up and learned to drive, there were restricted licenses for those who took their test on an automatic and there was a law that forbade 4-way stop signs. Both are long gone.
A friend who had never driven a stick helped with the driving on a long distance trip. It took five minutes and only one stall to get him doing it and by the time the trip was over, he was a pro. And I insisted my kids learn on a stick.
I guess he’ll just have to stick to carjacking automatics then.
So I guess with the advent of driverless cars, carjacking will become an option even for the totally inept criminal?
Slightly off-topic, but a thief once tried to steal my brother’s stick-shift sports car out of his parking lot late one night. Broke in, drilled out the ignition, and only then discovered that my brother’s battery was dead. He discovered the (surprisingly minimal) break-in damage the next morning. The fact that it was a stick shift helped a lot in getting it out and getting it fixed, because we were able to roll it back out of the space and then push it (downhill) across the parking lot to get it started. The key was useless, but he was able to turn the ignition with a large screwdriver.
He drove it around like that for a few days before he could get it fixed. We joked about going somewhere with valet parking and handing over the screwdriver, but the occasion never presented itself.
A couple of years ago the alternator went kaput in my old manual trans Nissan truck, in a strip mall parking lot not far from home. There was a van load of young able bodied guys in the lot so l asked them if they could push start me. To a man, they were astonished that such a thing was even possible.
yes, I remember a funny story a few years back, think it happened in Florida, the thief actually asked the owner how to drive it, didn’t work out well.
I was looking at a new car recently and the salesman told me that less than 5% of cars sold in the country are manual and it is getting worse. Even high performance cars that should only be manual aren’t. Tragic really.
Coincidentally (I have been toying with the notion of getting another, used, car and have decided thatl want it to be a stick because both of my work vans are autos) l stopped at a used car lot today. The owner told me that he would not even buy or take as a trade in a manual trans car, because “nobody wants them.”
I guess l don’t think it is tragic or anything, auto and hybrid transmissions have come a long way. But l personally am an automotive Luddite and would rather drive a stick. Luckily there are plenty for sale on craigslist. 
okay tragic might be a tad extreme. I do drive a stick, so no complaining here. 
If the number of automatic cars vs manual on any given new car lot is any indication, a good 90%+ of the car buying population in the US wants nothing to do with stick shift cars. I got a screaming deal on my brand new Mazda a couple of years ago because it’s a stick (which I wanted) and it had been sitting on their lot for the better part of a year.
My husband is car shopping, and trying to find a stick shift car to test drive is a bear. Yes, you can get a reasonable idea of whether your going to like a car or not by driving the auto version, but pedal and shifter placement can make a difference, not to mention the actual shifting etc.
Even the F-250 I use for trailering is a stick - I much prefer it.
I’m not sure what’s “hateful” about the observation that many/most Americans can’t drive stick. From my experience, it’s true, but I think as mentioned above, it’s partly generational, but also partly geographical. Pretty much the only people I know my age (I’m almost 40) who know how to drive a stick grew up in a more rural part of the country. I learned how to drive stick out of necessity when living overseas, but before I was in my 20s, had never driven one. I don’t think I even knew a person who had a stick shift until my sophomore or junior year in college. They were just not common here (in Chicago.) I drive a stick now and I’ve learned since that if I need someone else to ever drive my car, I’m pretty much shit out of luck.
Meanwhile, my observation in Europe, specifically in Hungary, was that somewhere around 1 in 12 cars were automatics, the rest stick. I would sometimes pass the time walking down the street by counting how many automatic transmissions I see in the cars I passed. Somewhere between 1 in 10 and 1 in 15 was the average.
In Europe cars are generally smaller (and so are the streets) and fuel is more than double the price in the US. Automatics are generally thought of as being less fuel efficient than small manual cars. For the same reason of economy, more diesel cars are now sold in the UK than petrol cars.
Yes. Five years ago, my son and I rented a car in Belgium. When the Hertz rep saw our Massachusetts driver’s license, we were immediately advised that they only had stick shifts for rent.
On a related note: I’m too old to teach. I want to give my granddaughter my VW, but I can’t find any driving schools that have a stick shift to teach her.
I learned to drive on an automatic, but I learned to drive stick when I was about 22, and all the cars I’ve had since have been stick, except for some rentals, and a roommate’s car I occasionally borrowed (it was an 8-cyl Ford Crown Vic that she inherited; I borrowed it when I needed a lot of passenger space).
Indiana must be an outlier, because when we bought a car in 2008, about 1/3 of the cars on the lot were stick, and I know lots of people who drive stick, including lots of young people, but then, there are people here who learn to drive when they are 12, operating tractors on the family farm.
Indiana has no mountains, but it’s very hilly, and even when I drive an automatic, I find myself shifting down to climb hills, or to go down them without overheating the brakes. It’s also not a place where you get stuck in stop and go traffic much (the only time when an automatic is really useful), so it’s a good place for manuals. Honestly, the only person I know who can drive a manual but doesn’t is my aunt, and that’s because she had a leg amputated. Well, and I guess my uncle, because now he has a car that she can drive in a pinch.
I never owned a car when I lived in New York. I don’t know if I would have considered buying an automatic because of the amount of time you spend in slow traffic. It was that kind of traffic, and the cost of parking, that made me not want a car in the first place.
I have on two occasions had to drive other people’s cars in emergencies, and both times they were stick, so it was a good thing I knew how.
I have heard of stories (only stories mind you) of Americans being refused service by rental companies because they thought that they were lying about being able to driving stick.
This thinking persists, but for newer models it isn’t really true anymore. Just taking Honda as an example, the auto versions of the Civic and Accord models all have better EPA ratings than the stick-shift versions, both around town and on the highway. The advent of five- (and six- and seven- and even eight-) speed automatic transmissions, as well as continuously variable transmissions, mean that automatics are now at least as fuel-efficient as manuals, and more sophisticated computers and electronics mean that the shifts are smoother and respond better than in the past.
As bengangmo noted above, it is getting harder and harder to buy a top-of-the-line sports car with a clutch pedal. There are no more true manuals from Ferrari or Lamborghini, and Aston Martin now only offer the six-speed manual on their bottom-of-the-range V8 Vantage. Porsche still sell proper manuals, especially at the bottom end of their price-and-performance range (particularly the Boxster), but the really powerful cars in the lineup (911 Turbo, and the amazing new 918 Spyder) now only come with the PDK transmission that allows automatic or manual shifting, but has no manual clutch.
All of this makes sense. The engines in these new sports cars are so incredibly powerful now, and the cars so incredibly fast, that 99 percent of the people who buy them (most of whom aren’t expert drivers) would probably put them through the nearest shrubbery if they also had to be concerned with changing gears.
And the fact is that even expert drivers nowadays can’t get these supercars off the line faster with a manual transmission than they can with the automatic. Porsche, for example, lists a 0-60 time of 4.3 seconds for the 911 Carrera S manual, and 4.1 seconds for the PDK automatic. A human being basically can’t change gears faster or more efficiently than a machine anymore. Hell, for drag-racing type starts, some of them even come with a Launch control button that basically removes any element of driver skill, and balances power and grip automatically in order to give the fastest possible takeoff from a standing start.
For those of us in the less rarefied driving atmosphere, though, a manual can still be more fun. When my wife and i were looking for a new (used) car a few months back, we would have had far more cars to choose from if we had been willing to buy an automatic. We were looking for a fuel-efficient four cylinder (Honda Civic, Mazda 3, Toyota Corolla, VW Jetta, etc.), and there must have been at least 15 or 20 autos available for every stick shift.
The stereotypes about who can and cannot drive a stick extends beyond just Americans, though. Quite a few of the salespeople we spoke to seemed quite surprised that my wife was interested in driving a manual.
We love driving a manual, but i have to admit that it really only works for us because of our somewhat peculiar work situation, and the nature of our commute. We rarely have to drive much at rush hour, and we work from home 2-3 days a week, even during the semester. If we had to drive on clogged freeways in stop-start traffic at rush hour, five days a week, i think an automatic would begin to look very attractive.
Note though that this is much less true outside of North America. All things being equal, manuals still have a slight efficiency edge over automatics, at least in small cars. In the US, they try to make the sticks the “sporty” option and so the gearing is usually much lower than the auto version. If you look at the fuel economy numbers for the version of the same car aimed at stingy Europeans, the (more sedately geared) manual version usually still does better than the autos. For example honda.co.uk says the Euro-spec Civic is 45.8 MPG vs 48.8 MPG for the auto and manual version with the same engine.