@Red: true dat. I don’t notice shifting any more than I notice steering…drive a stick for a couple years and it’s reflexive.
Bought my first new car in 1986 and have always bought new…bought my sixth 5MT in 2006. At the time I looked, I was consulting websites and shooting down competitors based on availability of a 5MT. The pickings were slim and getting anorexic.
Back in the day, that was always one of the tricks the dealers used, right? Advertise a very low-priced vehicle and when the customer wants to see it, the salesman tells you it’s a manual—figuring you’ll want an automatic which of course costs extra. It was so much fun not flinching: “Great! That’s exactly what I want!” Nobody ever gave me shit about trading in a 5 speed because of course, that’s what I was buying.
I would bet that the real reason manuals are disappearing has to do with money. If you’re cranking out cars, it’s extra work to have to build a few MTs into the assembly line. Then you have to distribute them so that each dealer gets one. You have to have all the parts when they go bad, etc. It unstreamlines production etc. Anybody who has paid extra to have a roll of Tri-X developed lately knows: black and white film is LESS difficult than color, but it’s a special order and doesn’t benefit any more from mass production principles.
I think, too, there’s a conspiracy afoot. Automatics get better and better mileage, fine: but why can’t they put a really tall 5th gear in the manual box for economy? They could; they just don’t want to encourage people to buy 5MTs. Then they look at the figures and poof, self-fulfilling prophecy, 5MT sales get lower every year.
I pulled up next to a Ferrari in traffic yesterday. Cars like those will always have MTs available. But for your daily drivers, I think the manual transmission is disappearing forever.
I sure would. My current car has power windows and the driver side doesn’t go down. I wish I had manual windows.
No, there’s nothing stopping you from controlling it yourself even if you had auto climate control. Again, I don’t mind that my car has it but I’d be happier if it didn’t. One less thing to break.
After that one time when my Mercedes power seats tried to crush me, yeah, I won’t be needing those again. I like my current manually adjustable Recaros a lot better.
EFI is a lot easier to adjust and control than carbs. Especially with a turbo. I’m sure some doper is going to jump in here and tell us all about how he tunes his Carbe’d 1984 Maserati Bi-turbo like a harp, but those people are decidedly in the minority.
I’m not a luddite, I just want to do different things with my cars. I live in a city with a reasonable public transit system and I happily went for long stretches without a car until I found the right car, and since I work downtown I never drive to work - puttering along at rush hour along the same route every day would bore me to tears.
I don’t understand why people buy boring cars to drive to work every day. These people are the worst kind of scum, IMO. They hate cars and driving, but insist on doing it anyway because public transit is just too hoi polloi for them. What a complete waste of petrol. I can’t wait until gas hits $6 (or $2/l) so we can get these grandmas off the road.
For most in the US, public transportation is not an option as it does not exist in there area. Whether you hate driving or not, it’s the only way to get to work.
I don’t want power windows or automatic climate control or anything like that (I do like my power door locks, but I could live without them again). The more power stuff I have on a car, the more stuff to go wrong. I’m fairly sure we’ve all heard the horror stories of someone who bought a car that was a lemon in the wiring department, and they never, ever got all the power stuff working right.
Some people just want to get somewhere, some people LIKE driving. If you like driving, controlling the machine, then an automatic tranny removes about half the attraction if you’re not doing performance driving.
For me it’s never been a matter of things being better in my day - I wasn’t born until long after automatics were considered the normal transmission for automobiles. I simply find the task of driving while shifting, and using the transmission to help me make the car do what I want to be more interesting, and more fun. I have had rare circumstances where I had objective reasons for being glad I had a manual vice an automatic. Rolling starts, and the ability to have a bit more control of the torque on ice or snow are both things I’ve appreciated with a manual.
Now, I am enough of a fuddy-duddy to think that it would be a good thing if more North American drivers did know how to drive a standard, but I don’t ascribe any mystical value to being a standard transmission driver. I just prefer it, for myself.
“Squatting into a corner” is a term beloved of motoring writers here, and like wine writers’ terminology, it’s a matter of opinion as to whether it’s accurate, bullshit, or somewhere in between.
For mine, it’s a real thing, and I know what they mean when they talk about it. It’s a bit like the captain of the Queen Mary ordering hard to starboard, and the ship will lean out a little as it corners, but a speedboat doing the same thing will often tend to dig in on the starboard side instead. Cars are a bit like this - driving an automatic through a corner (or a manual if it’s a poor driver who goes through it in neutral or on the clutch as some do) will result in some body lean towards the outside of the corner (admittedly this is getting less and less noticeable on modern vehicles), because the thing is usually in too tall a gear, and it’s natural for the driver to ease off the gas while doing this. In a manual, you can change down for the corner, and then you’ll be able to provide instant power to the wheels through the corner without going too fast - not a lot of power (it’s a corner after all), but just that little bit which keeps the wheels driven rather than coasting, and this seems to have an effect on the car’s suspension. It’s a positive effect, too.
I’m afraid the above is anecdotal, and if you want a cite, well, I got nuttin’. But it’s a real effect for me.
It’s also one of the reasons I cringe when people will make the manual gearbox preference = macho insecurity one (and no, not you Broomstick, but plenty of others on here). They’ll go out and buy an expensive automatic with turbochargers and everything but the kitchen sink hanging off it, but often an old, slow beater can be much more fun, just because it’s a manual. I just like the things, is all - rationally or otherwise.
Automatics were certainly the norm when I was growing up in the 60s - it wasn’t until about 1970 or so that I rode in a manual car. The smaller cars that came out in the early 70s tended to have manual and it was sort of an exotic thing. We owned two different Ford Pintos that my brothers used, and those were both manual.
With the increasing common-ness of compact cars, it seemed like manual transmission did indeed make a comeback in the 70s and 80s. My first car was a Fiat 128 wagon which was a manual, and I never bought a car with automatic untiil I got a minivan in 1996.
It’s still the norm for larger cars to only have automatic transmission, and manual to be an option only for smaller cars.
I don’t know what the sales percentages are for cars which offer the option of manual vs. automatic. We certainly had no trouble finding a manual-shift Civic in 1998 when we needed to get one on short notice (the 1990 Civic had just been totalled).
Surprising that some cars are now offering manual as a more expensive add-on!
I presume that while American companies, in the 40s and 50s, could focus on developing things like torque convertors, European manufacturers had different priorities out of necessity, i.e. recovering, and making inexpensive vehicles so that they could be sold, in a time of shattered economies.
Manual windows? - yep, still got 'em (I drive a '95 Ford van) and wouldn’t change 'em. My mother’s VW window mechanism broke with the window down. Motor had to be changed, for $$$. Garage says it’s a common defect on that model.
AC? - nope, haven’t got that either. Don’t need it in this country more than about three days a year (less this year).
I think you have nailed it. The popularization of cell phones has to be a major factor in the decline of manual transmissions, since it’s impossible to to shift, steer, and use a cell phone all at the same time, at least without a hands-free apparatus. Even with one, you still need a hand to hold and dial the phone, unless you have some sort of voice command or quick dial setup that eliminates the need for it.
Here in California, the hands-free cell phone law came into effect on July 1, and until now, we’ve had a hot summer. It wasn’t long before I noticed people in parked cars–pulled over by the curb, in grocery store parking lots, wherever–with doors ajar and windows open, making the calls that they would have been making on the road but were no longer allowed to. To be frank, I found it very inconvenient myself, and finally got a Bluetooth headset a couple of weeks ago. It really does save time to be able to make calls while driving, and I think, as long as the calls are not too distracting, I don’t think they are a problem.
Given that legislation preventing their use is being introduced not only in California but also elsewhere (Britain’s had it for some time), how are they going to be the death of the manual?
I’m with you, GorillaMan. My solution to the quandary of not being able to use a cell phone while driving a stick is that I don’t use the cell while driving. Of course, I tend to dislike cell phones anyways. I have never been one of those people who viewed being always available for contact to be something I wanted. In some situations it’s useful. For me, though, that’s a grudging admission, and I still hate carrying the cell with me.
I was going to say…every time I mention that I live in the city and drive stick, the reaction is invariably: “Oh, that’s really got to suck in traffic.” No, it doesn’t, at least not to me. I like it because it gives me something to do while stuck in traffic.
More likely to be the death of the car phone. (and since when did we actually need to make phone calls driving along? We managed without it all these years.)
Na, it’s easy enough to use a cell phone while driving a manual (not that I do.) Provided I don’t need to come to a full stop, I can pretty much drive my Corolla in 3rd gear all day in town. Otherwise you can just use the hand that has the phone to push the gear stick around when necessary.
I guess not if you have a manual transmission, manual roll-up windows and no air conditioning.
Check out those electronic fuel injectors, they’re really cool and they save a lot of gas. You can even start your engine in the winter without having to shoot ether into the carburetor.
Using the phone while driving is likely to be made completely illegal here before too long (already illegal without a handsfree).
As I drive a diesel I have to put up with injectors. But at least with an SU carb you could work out what was going on, and didn’t need to take it to a licenced bandit with a diagnostic machine.