Realted question maybe suitable for a seperate thread:
Anybody out there who knows how to drive a motorcylce yet can’t drive a manual automobile?
Yeah, strange. Part of it may be not wanting to be dependent on a parent, fear of failure, or not wanting to take the time. The elitist types try to make it sound very difficult and a major accomplishment to learn. Maybe so for some people. My first experience was a Pennsylvania V-plate truck in a supermarket parking lot.
That is how I feel exactly.
It might not help if you’re implying to them that someone who can’t drive stick is somehow less masculine that someone who can. Then you’re adding some extra anxiety- not only might they not be able to learn stick, but their parents will think they’re less masculine because they can’t learn stick. Extra anxiety generally doesn’t help with learning things related to driving.
Or it’s possible that their experience learning driving from you was not something they wish to repeat, for whatever reason. It’s also possible that they don’t want to get back into the parent-child dynamic with you, where you as the parent teach them as the child. My parents and I get along well, but not when they’re trying to teach me to do something. I generally avoid those kinds of situations with them, because I know it’s very likely to end with everybody upset and frustrated.
Personally, I think it speaks well for their masculinity that they do not feel that driving a minivan threatens it in some way. I’ve never understood men who think that something they wear or something they drive can somehow make them less masculine.
Around here, if you leave a decent gap ahead of you, someone will pull into it. Even on surface streets, not just the interstate. So you’d be stopping anyway.
Viewing your automobile as an “appliance” or an “A to B machine” does not equate to crappy driving habits. Someone can treat a car as a tool and still give driving the requisite level of attention to detail and judgment. And some people who view automobiles as “fun toys” do so by engaging in unsafe practices like street racing. Or weaving through traffic. Safety isn’t about enjoying driving, it’s about paying attention and treating other drivers with respect.
This right after a post where someone accuses people who like automatics of being unsafe. People aren’t reacting negatively to a stated preference for manuals, they are reacting negatively to statements that prefering automatics is inferior. Besides, the statement you quoted was a sincere request for factual information about the advantages of a manual transmission over automatics. As in, “What do I not know?”
On my automatic, if I brake from cruise because of traffic, then get open lane, I hit “resume” and my car will accelerate to restore the cruise point. I don’t see cruise on a manual doing that. But yeah, I found out that manuals could have a cruise feature. Still, I had other desires for automatic.
Oops, I transposed what I meant. Yeah, I meant automatics don’t anticipate my needs. Grrrr.
The only thing ever implied to them was that if the minivan wasn’t available for some reason, they could then use the other car.
If it were just me, or just their mother, I might say you had a point. But we had entirely different styles when we were teaching them how to drive. Also, they still ask us for advice in other areas.
Before I had the Sunfire, I drove a Ford Taurus. As “middle-age” as a Taurus might seem, that was ALWAYS their preferred choice to drive. They reacted to driving the minivan exactly the way you’d stereotypically expect a 20-year old male to react. I seriously doubt their masculinity evolved that much between July, when I drove a Taurus, and August, when I drove a Sunfire.
Nope, they just don’t want to learn to drive a stick. Of course by now they’ve probably decided they’ll never need to know how, except for the almost unimaginable time when they’re back home, and the other car isn’t available.
Good lord.
I’ve owned both manuals and autos. I drive have be driving over the freeking continental divide every damn day for 18 years. 11,500 feet. I go into 4 wheel drive every damn day for 6 months out of the year. Every Day. Yes the manual does give you a little bit more control. The worst thing that the auto does is up or down shift on an icy road when you may not expect it. But if you are in any way a decent driver, it just is not a problem.
I don’t really care. Pretty much all cars are autos now. My Pathfinder has LIFETIME fluid in its trany and I don’t have to mess with it at all.
Good Lord, this is almost as ugly as a Mac v. PC thread! 
Why not? 
It does exactly that. The cruise control has no idea what gear the transmission is in (that’s true for a manual or an automatic); it only knows what speed it’s supposed to shoot for. Just like your automatic, the cruise control on my Maxima (and on my motorcycle) “remembers” what its previous set speed was even after I’ve tapped the brake (or even pulled in the clutch and downshifted), and I can hit “resume” and get back to that same set speed.
The cruise control on my previous car (an '88 Acura Legend with a manual trans) behaved the same way.
The cruise control on my manual does that as well.
But I never use cruise (my husband uses it). I’m a control freak, that’s why I have a manual.
I’ll give you one advantage: I don’t have to worry about my teenager or his friends stealing my car to joyride. They couldn’t get it out of the driveway.
The same is true here. But it isn’t a continuous flow of cars filling up every available space; it’s often 30 seconds or a minute before someone decides to fill the gap–possibly a lot longer if the lane next to me is going the same average speed, and the cars that happen to be next to me don’t feel like changing lanes. So I can sometimes maintain a gap for minutes at a time.
Skimmed the thread but this may have been addressed already: Is there an equivalent to popping the clutch in an automatic? That little trick saved me a few times back in the 90’s when my battery went dead.
This is probably similar to the circumcision debate in that you’re probably going to like whichever option you learned to play with as you were growing up, and the other option just seems alien.
That’s all completely reasonable, but the fact is that we don’t yet have automated, electric, high-speed personal transportation devices quite yet. Or Star Trek transporters, for that matter. In the meantime, we all have to sit behind the wheel from time to time. Why not enjoy it?
What exactly are you doing that you enjoy? Taking a new route and seeing new scenery? Ok, I’ll admit that can be fun the first few times you take that route. But after the first dozen or so times, then what? You only have so many routes to work. There are speed limits, there are other people on the road, it’s not like you can race the thing.
I’m not trying to be smart, but I don’t get it (I think this is where the fundamental disconnect between ‘car people/not car people’ comes in). When I was younger I could have a lot of fun with a fast, decent handling car. But all the fun I had came at the expense of breaking the law and behaving recklessly. It was dangerous to me and to others and I don’t do it anymore. How much fun can you really have with a car on a public road before you’re breaking the law or being irresponsible? For me the answer is ‘not a lot.’
To a first approximation, engines wear out because you have parts rubbing up against each other, and lubrication isn’t perfect. An engine at twice the RPM has twice the “rubs per second” and (again, very roughly) wears at twice the rate, even if it’s producing a similar amount of power.
Piston powered airplanes require engine maintenance every X hours, but this isn’t a true measure of time–it’s calculated based on a fixed cruise RPM, so in fact the maintenance cycle is based on the number of turns the engine completed. Car engines are no different, but because safety is less critical, their maintenance cycles are based on cruder measures.
That’s not to say there isn’t a time or place for using the full RPM range–if you need the power, then use it–but it will cause extra wear.
Modern cars require electrical powerbefore the engine starts; the ECU needs power to know when to fire the spark plugs and fuel injectors, and the fuel pump needs power to deliver fuel pressure to the injectors. If your battery is completely flat, bump starting your manual-trans car won’t work. If your battery still has some life in it, then it might work, or (if it’s like my car) it might not, due to some peculiar interlock.
As for automatics, I’ve never heard of bump-starting being possible.
For those of us who don’t really like driving, making it so it requires more thought and more effort is the opposite of making it better. I pay attention to the road because I need to, but that leaves a lot of mental room for listening to NPR or planning my day. Since I enjoy that more than I enjoy thinking about driving, any extra mental thought I have to give to the drive makes it less enjoyable.
It’s like taking someone who doesn’t like to mow the lawn and giving them a push reel mower. They still get the lawn mowed, but it’s more effort to do so. Why would anyone who doesn’t enjoy something want to spend one iota more effort on it than they need to, when it gets the same result? (With driving that means I get from point A to point B safely and comfortably, which is all I want from a car.)
/edit: I’m not saying a manual isn’t great for someone who likes to drive, but it’s probably not for those that don’t. In fact, the only people I know who still own cars with manual transmissions are “into” cars.
I learned to drive in a '67 Volkswagen with a stick. Actually, before that I was in the passenger seat and mom would let me steer a bit. After I was expert with that I started learning the stick. Imagine first learning to use a stick left handed from the passenger seat! Then I got a few times of learning to press the accelerator from the passenger seat. That was just a few times, to get the feel of how little you had to move the pedal to accelerate. It was much to hard to do it more than a few times.
When I was finally in the driver seat learning, it was strange using my right hand on the stick, but I adapted quickly. Back when Blue Laws had shopping malls closed on Sundays we would go to the empty lot and I would practice. I learned how to idle stopped on this 3 foot 45-degree “curb” (pretending it was a 4-way stop) before starting into a turn. Fun times! It served me well later when I had to make it up a 20 foot ice covered hill onto an icy two-lane blacktop. After one experimental drive halfway up to get the feel of the traction, I popped up without a slip.
After transmission and clutch started to fail I often had to start driving from 2nd gear. Decades later, brother-in-law had a stick shift and I hadn’t driven one in … decades. The feeling came back immediately and it was no problem at all.
I’d never advocate driving recklessly, but hot-rodding it a little bit can be safe, legal, and fun. Take those turns a little bit faster. Floor it when hitting the onramp onto the highway. Whatever.
Or, try different driving styles. See if you can time each traffic light perfectly. If your car as a real-time meter, try to minimize fuel consumption. Put a ball on the passenger seat and see just how smoothly you can drive.
And if you have a manual, just practice your shifting in different regimes. Although anyone can learn to shift easily in the common case, it can be a challenge even after several years to shift quickly and smoothly from a high RPM. I’ve been driving stick for over a decade and even I can’t do it perfectly every time, so there’s always room for a little practice. Not to mention that there are tradeoffs; a very fast shift will never be perfectly smooth, so you can explore that space with varying technique.
Anyway, I’d be the last to say that all my commutes are fun-filled joyrides. But surely there’s a difference between “a small amount of fun” vs. “no fun at all”.
Yes, the “small amount of fun,” as we’re trying to tell you comes from something other than having to pay more attention to the mechanics of driving. Two of us have mentioned listening to NPR for example.
To me, this all reads like a list of completely unnecessary ways to make driving more dangerous.
This is how I translate what I quoted from your post: “I’d never advocate driving recklessly, but I’m suggesting that you drive a little more recklessly, for reasons that don’t appeal to you at all.”
Is it impossible for you to understand that some people have zero interest in this stuff?