In the movie Vantage Point, Dennis Quaid’s character commandeers a European car during a chase sequence. This same thing happens in countless movies - the commando/secret agent hero has to steal or hijack some car in another country and use it to chase someone, or whatever.
It got me thinking - the majority of people in America nowadays probably do not know how to drive a stick shift. Cars today come with automatic transmissions by default, so the average person doesn’t need to bother learning how to use a clutch and manual gearshift.
But this is not the case around the rest of the world. So are special-forces soldiers in the U.S. military trained in how to drive a stick if they don’t know already? In the event that they might need to requisition a foreign vehicle during the course of a mission?
I imagine that with the machismo necessary to want to be Special Forces to begin with, those guys wouldn’t permit themselves to not know how to drive stick. It’d be an embarrassment.
I would hope that most soldiers would know how to drive a vehicle with a manual transmission. I have no idea, but I can’t imagine that many military vehicles have automatic transmissions. Do they?
I haven’t seen the movie, but isn’t Quaid’s character a Secret Service agent? I presume they’d be required to know how to drive stick. Never know when you might have to drive a non-automatic vehicle in the line of duty.
I think the more mundane answer would be that most people in the Army, SF or not, probably would have had to learn how to drive a military vehicle that had some manner of manual transmission - the M35 6 x 6 truck, for example. While it might come in handy when you need to hijack a foreign car, Presumably being able to drive a truck full of MREs from the depot to the training area is also a pretty good reason.
I can drive a stick, but I’d be hard pressed to be able to jump in to any strange vehicle and make an efficent go of it, especially in a pressure situation. There’s not enough standardization of shift patterns and clutch weights out there.
Eh? Shift patterns are almost always standardized except for where reverse gear goes.
Clutch weights, not so much, but if you’re commandeering a vehicle you aren’t going to be all that worried about burning out the clutch so you can just dump it each shift.
Oh come on. I learned how during a test drive of a new car that I ended up buying 20 years ago. It took a few days to get proficient, and a few months to feel comfortable on hills, but it’s not exactly rocket science. There’s a clutch. There’s a pattern of gears. There’s a red line. Go!
In my luck I’d have grabbed some obscure Romanian made thing that had the gears in the totally wrong order and I’d just stall the thing out while those annoying Euro cop sirens came ever closer.
I believe that it is a skill that everyone should pick up, so I taught all three of my daughters how to drive a stick. Their first car was an old beat-up Chevy Cavalier. If they wanted to drive, they had to learn the stick! I told them that it would be handy if they are ever chased by chain-saw wielding zombies and hop into the old truck parked at a deserted gas station. They would not end up as all the air-head bimboes do in the horror movies, hacked and gibbeted!
I would believe that any Special Ops guy has to know not only how to drive a stick, but how to repair the engine on a stcik-shift.
Sounds like a good way to keep daughters from going on dates. “Sorry honey, you can’t go out unless you can kill this Grizzly. I’m not going to let my daughter go out unprepared.”
I was already deathly afraid of bears. Now you have ensured that one day I will be deathly afraid that bears will eat my as-yet not conceived daughter. :eek:
But come on. Learning a stick isn’t exactly an obscure skill, like flint knapping or butter churning or falconry. Sure, most cars sold in the US are automatics, but it ain’t like they’re rare as hens teeth. Even if there are people out there who can’t drive a stick they aren’t the overwhelming majority.
In other words: cite that most Americans can’t drive a stick?
