Surely the other way around? The existence of this restriction (certainly going back at least to the 1980s) is one reason for manuals to stay popular. Most people learn to drive in their parents’ car, which is likely to be a manual, and most instructors also have manuals. So if you’ve learnt to drive one, you get the licence for one. So you’re in the habit of driving one. And when you’re a parent yourself, you don’t want to restrict your kids to an automatic licence, so you buy a manual yourself when they’re approaching 17 (I know two people who made exactly that reasoning when considering switching to an automatic).
Last summer, I was on a coach trip to Italy. Two of the coaches were automatics, the third manual. The drivers of the latter kept on getting stick from the others (apologies for the pun), because they’d pull away from every toll booth fastest, but end up last because of the drop in speed every change of gear.
With some of the early automatics you could push start them. The only catch was that you had to get them up to around 30mph. before the transmission built up enough pressure to turn over the engine. This was not recommended by the manufacturers.
This leads to an old UL, which has died out because no one gets it anymore.
The story goes like this: A guy is stranded alongside the highway w/ a dead battery. This woman stops along side him and asks if she can help. He replies that, if she wouldn’t mind, she could give him a push, to get the car started. She agrees to do this and he then explains that he has an automatic transmission, so she’s going to have to get him going about thirty or so before the car will start. She says OK and he gets in his car. She backs up to get in position and he’s occupied making sure the key is on, the E-brake is off, and the transmission is in gear. He then looks in his mirror, to discover that she has backed up a couple hundred feet and is now barreling toward his rear bumper like a bat out of hell. 
I heard that from a review of an off roading game on the PC of all places, is it true and if so, why? Perhaps because your hands are freer and if you don’t need to shift up and down ratios as much, you could lock the vehicle in that “2” mode to keep it between 1st and 2nd?
I am confused by the implication that driving stick is some sort of a voodoo art that requires separate testing and certification or you are bound to kill someone. Do you also have a cupholder validation sticker on your license when you pass your cupholder exams? :dubious:
Shifting gears might be a bit tricky, but I don’t think it’s so much different from driving automatic to require a license category. It’s not like it’s motorcycles or airplanes that require a fundamentally different approach as well as different way of looking at the transportation task in front of you. A bus, a tractor, a car, a truck - if it keeps it’s own balance, has a steering wheel and can go forward you can drive it after a cursory scan of the owners manual or watching somebody do it for ten minutes. To (possibly mis-) quote Dave Barry “It’s not a spaceship, asshole. Drive.”
Strangely I’ve encountered this attitude in the US as well. Last time I was moving I took my chances and did not reserve a U-Haul, but simply showed up on the day of the move and rented whatever they had available. Err, I didn’t expect the only thing available to be a 24’ diesel stick-shift mover, but I wasn’t going to turn it down. At that point I’ve driven stick once before in a parking lot and it was a 4-cyl saturn. I took the keys, got in and drove it home where my friends were eagerly waiting to help me load it. For some reason I got a few “…and they just let you rent it?” and one “Do you even know how to drive stick?” … “Well I do now.”
Now, which component of driving stick is considered to be dangerous or all that different? So you have a new pedal that gives you some control over how engine power is applied and you have to shift the car into the right gear. Yes, if you throw it into the wrong gear or do something stupid with the clutch you could potential cause some sudden movement/noises, but if you throw an automatic into P on the freeway it ain’t going to be pretty either. It’s not that much different from a mountain bike vs. road bike.
Strange people.
P.S. The only place I’ve actually seen the cliche jerk-stall-jerk-stall failure is TV. I’ve never seen anybody have trouble with stick, I’ve never had to avoid somebody because they were stalling every twenty feet and I’ve never heard anybody grind gears on the street. Are you sure inability to drive stick isn’t made up?
I can think of numerous situations where not knowing how to drive a manual properly could be potentially hazardous. Knowing when to select which gears to accelerate quickly enough to match traffic speed when merging, hill starts, failure to use low gears on steep descents, etc.
Your missing one big difference. You only have two feet and there are three pedals. No problem, if you’re on a flat surface, or even a down grade, but if you’re going uphill you’ve got a problem. Sure, there’s always the emergency brake, but that’s a bit awkward, it’s much easier if you have the dexterity to take your foot off the brake, let out the clutch and accelerate w/o stalling, rolling back, or jerking, not something that comes naturally.
You drove a 24ft rental truck, now try it w/ an 18 wheeler, grossing 80,000 and get 7-8-9 hundred thousand out of a clutch. (replacements run upward of 7-8 hundred, or more).
A couple of reasons.
The first is, as you said, it takes your attention off of driving, braking, and not rolling your “Jeep”.
The other has to do with stall speed.
My car has a 200 HP engine and an automatic transmission with a 1900 RPM stall speed.
My car is good for approximately 40 gross horsepower per 1000 RPM.
If it’s stuck at 800 RPM, I’ve got less than 40 horsepower to play with, but this will ONLY happen in a stick. With my transmission, all I have to do is punch the gas and I’m making 76 horsepower, even if I happen to be going 3 MPH. With a stick, if 3 MPH works out to 750 RPM, then my accessible horsepower is going to be about the same as my grandfather’s lawn tractor… 15 or so. Might get your Wrangler up that hill, might not.
By the way, on traditional GM transmissions, if you put the shift selector in “2” then you’re in 2. It doesn’t choose between 1 and 2, it just starts you out in 2 and won’t shift up to 3 in most situations.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Driving a manual is not particularly what I’d call a voodoo art. It’s a skill, but a simple one (for the purposes of the average suburban driver). Controlling the clutch and gear lever might not be particularly harder than controlling the wheel, brake, and accelerator. HOWEVER, think back to your first ever driving lesson, and how clunky you were with those latter controls. A confident, intelligent driver with auto-only experience will frustratingly find themselves at that initial parking lot newbie stage when driving manual for the first time. Sure, they can pick it up quickly, but you don’t want that time to be an inconvenient one. I would classify driving an unfamiliar rental car in an unfamiliar city as an inconvenient time. Or having to get a sick or injured person to hospital in their car. Or numerous other scenarios.
One difference between the gear controls and the other controls is that for some non-mechanically minded people, their function isn’t clear. Certainly not as clear as “This is the go thing, this is the stop thing, and this is the left and right thing”. If you don’t understand torque bands, the trade-off of power versus speed, etc, you might be a little behind the eight ball when learning.
Many manual drivers do overstate the skill involved, it is true. But I agree with the licencing system that makes a distinction. I know that, for my own jurisdiction, there was for a time a sensible compromise - and that was that new drivers who had passed the test in an automatic couldn’t drive a manual for a period of several years. That seemed reasonable. I don’t know if it’s still the case.
And yes, just tonight coming home from work, I saw a guy do a classic and almost ridiculously exaggerated series of kangaroo hops right across the intersection where I was waiting. It almost looked like one of those bouncy cars some US Latinos drive (sorry, don’t know the term). He didn’t stall it, but came close.
I don’t think gear-crunching in a car-sized vehicle is usually as audible to folks outside the car as it is in the movies. It does happen a lot though. Ask any stick driver about their first lessons. Actually no, ask the long-suffering friend or relative who gave the lessons - the poor sap who owns the car. They’ll assure you it’s real.
Starting a heavy truck with a manual tranny is easy. The first gear has a ratio so low that even by just letting go the clutch, it will start rolling. The few times I have driven a large truck (rental movers) I normally start in second gear (on an empty truck, at least).
I learned to drive in very hilly terrain, in an underpowered car (a Chevette in Caracas) it sure wasn’t voodoo but it took some practice. When you are bumper to bumber in a steep hill, you sweat cold bullets (until you learn, that is). Stalling and lurching are very common things.
I also was the drving teacher for many of my friends (I am the unfazeable type). Some people jut don’t get it. Some people get it right the first time. It is certainly not a trivial thing.
Snopes on Gear Disaster and Choke Hold.
And, going back to actually read the thread instead of scanning it, I see that Askance beat me to it by a long shot.
I’ve seen many newbie drivers have problems with this. Lilbro used to be so afraid of having to get the car into first and do the whole brake-to-gas-while-lifting-other-foot-from-clutch that he’d stall the car a lot, because he’d let the revs go too low. He would also stop the car as close to the garage door as possible, which made the slight upslope worse (there is a bit of an upslope to that garage and the entrance also curves, fun fun, specially since it’s in a very busy street with horrible pedestrian and motorized traffic).
Trying to start the car on a steep upward incline, when there’s another car 2 ft behind you.
I learned to drive with a standard transmission – only it was ‘four on the floor’. (Or ‘three on the floor’, in the case of the '48 Willys I had at the time.) It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I encountered ‘three on the tree’. I had to drive a surplus El Camino from my grandparent’s spread to my uncle’s house. First gear, no problem. Second gear, no problem. But after that I didn’t know the shift pattern. Nobody told me, and I’d just gotten into the car and drove it off after my dad and uncle. I had a heck of a time keeping up with them. When I finally caught up to them at a stop sign, they had a good laugh at my expense. Then they said the pattern was like my Willys, only on the column.
Amateurs. I can drink a cup of coffee, eat a snickers bar, signal to change lanes AND shift down into 4th gear while talkign to my mom while driving stick.
Mind you, she gets pissed when I prove I can do it. 
I once saw a woman in a Cadillac driving her car, talking on a mobile phone, smoking a cigarette, and picking her nose simultaneously. But then, she was in an automatic and on the freeway.
Certainly when I got my licence in 1954 (in Pennsylvania) you got a restricted licence if you used an automatic. I don’t know when that changed. When my kids got their licences (in Quebec) between 1983 and 1990 they were advised by their driving instructors to rent an automatic rather that use my car because shifting was one thing they wouldn’t have to worry about.
One point that I think no one has mentioned. Urban driving here requires driving through a forest of stop signs. These are rather rare in Europe, in my experience. There are streets here with stop signs every block and even a few with stop signs in the middle of the block serving no actual function except to impede traffic. These are massively unfriendly to stick shifts and I think the outcry would be enormous if everyone had to shift. They are also enormously wasteful of fuel, contribute to excess CO2 and nobody stops at them anyway (but they do slow down and I do have to go into second). I will be buying probably my last car this spring (my 17 year old Honda Civic is just giving me too many problems) and I will likely break down and get an automatic.
I think we have another trans-Atlantic divide here! In the UK the driving test is meant to ensure the driver can not only handle the vehicle but can use it safely on our horribly crowded roads. I assume the reasoning for the extra test is that it is dangerous enough to let a 17 year old loose in public with half a ton of metal capable of moving a 100mph without him having to spend even an aditional fraction of a second thinking, “Now which is the brake?”
Perhaps we’re not such strange people when you compare road crash fatality rates (Road Deaths per 100000 of population – 2002 figures); UK 6.1, Australia 8.8, and USA 14.9. with some States (Mississippi and Wyoming) reaching over 30 :dubious: