the most economical gear to be in is the highest gear that doesn’t lug the engine.
Did it when I spent a few months in Tonga, everything there is right-hand drive. Was odd at first, but not undoable.
My first Chevy truck was a 3-on-the-tree, that was different enough!
Did make my daughter learn to drive a stick, stood her in good stead when a lady she went to a dog show with broke her ankle at the show, & my daughter had to drive her manual Toyota truck back from Bend.
I like the sticks, but love my Allison transmission for towing up & down the mountains…will engine brake going downhill if you have it in cruise, or you can switch to manual & select the gear you want. Not shifting, as such, but the best of both worlds, IMO.
My G37 didn’t have an indicator like that on the display, but of course it showed instantaneous and average MPG, so you could get a coarse idea of how things were going if you cared to pay attention.
This - but of course nobody wants to drive a manual like that, because it assures that you will have to downshift the moment you want to accelerate even a little bit.
Unless you’re driving a diesel.
When on the Freeway, my Volvo c30 t5 with six speed manual does just fine in 6th gear, plenty of acceleration.
I prefer it for sports cars because it is more fun and gives a greater feeling of control. Shifting with the paddle shifters just isn’t the same.
I don’t anymore. I love it because I love the process of driving, and I enjoyed changing gears and the extra control a stick shift provides over an automatic transmission.
Then I moved to a major city and discovered that you are constantly shifting. By the time you shift through the gears, it’s time to slow down or stop at a stop sign or light. Never having a free hand got real old.
I learned on 3 on the tree, and drove a lot of manuals before I got my drivers license.
First two cars where autos. Second three where manuals. And last two autos. Driven in all kinds of city, open highway, and mountains. Frankly, I don’t care which it is. Once you know the car, I don’t even think about it. Stop and go traffic never bothered me in a manual, nor do hills at stop lights.
EXCEPT - Uphill on ice covered curvy mountain roads, I prefer a manual. If it decides to down shift on an icy curve, it can mess you up.
Depends very much on the car. My G37, sixth gear was low enough to have plenty of get-up-and-go when cruising on the interstate (the downside was reduced MPG). On the car I owned before that, sixth gear was awfully tall; I got pretty good highway MPG, but in spite of having a nice big V6, you really needed to get out of sixth gear if you wanted to meaningfully change your speed.
I had a Ford Focus as a rental car once, which I assume had Ford’s now notorious 6-speed dual clutch auto. 6th gear on that car was so tall when I’d move over to the left lane to pass a slower vehicle I would step on the gas and not much would happen. So I’d give it a little more gas, and then it would downshift and accelerate fairly rapidly and then upshift back to 6th. That really annoyed me how it needed to downshift every time I wanted to accelerate on the freeway even the slightest bit.
And getting back to the OP’s question, if that car had been a manual at least I could have downshifted it myself in anticipation of wanting to accelerate, rather than waiting for the computer to figure out that’s what I wanted. Although I think I’d find the need for downshifting to get any meaningful change in speed annoying regardless of the transmission type.
After you’ve been driving a manual for a while, it doesn’t feel like any additional effort to shift unless you are in heavy traffic. For the most part, shifting just becomes another automatic action like steering and pressing on the gas. The benefit of being able have finer control over the transmission is a nice enhancement. It’s like having better steering or suspension. But the extra work is very evident in stop-and-go traffic and it’s not really worth it in those conditions.
Yes, around town i get maybe mid- 20mpg, I can get 30MPG only on long freeway trips in 6th.
A DCT is pretty much a given on high-performance sportscars; paddle shifters behind the steering wheel give the driver full control over gear selection, and shifts can be completed faster than with a manual.
If Ford left paddle shifters of of your rental Focus, AND they didn’t provide the gear selector lever with a +/- shift feature, then yes, it was a guaranteed-to-disappoint turd.
I prefer them because they are more fun. When I’m driving, driving is the only thing I can do, so it’s more fun to involve both my feet and both my hands in the action. I also appreciate that the car does what I want it to do rather than occasionally surprising me with some unwanted downshift.
Perhaps for some people. I currently have two cars, one is an automatic model year 2019 mid-size sedan and one is a model year 2006 Miata. The sedan is rated at 23 mpg city and 34 highway. I can beat 34 highway pretty comfortably if I really try but usually, I just about match it. I struggle to get 21 in the city. I generally get 18-19 mpg around town. My overall average in this car is 22 mpg in 6,000 miles. My Miata is rated at 20 mpg city and 28 mpg highway. It is mostly worn out with 130,000 miles. I flog the hell out of it when I drive it. I can’t seem to get less than 30 mpg in it. Every manual car I’ve owned, I have handily beaten the rated MPG. I only had one automatic I did that with, and that car was built in 1986. My more recent automatics have all been mileage disappointments.
To the person driving the car, a clutch failure is a transmission failure. It stops the car from moving and it costs a lot to fix. There is little difference to the user between that and a transmission failure.
I look forward to self-driving cars because I’d rather be reading than driving through traffic. Until then, I’ll make get the most enjoyment out of my driving time with a manual.
I’m equipped with both pieces of equipment but only one requires constant attention. Perhaps something is wrong with yours.
We know someone who hasn’t been shopping for new Ferraris or Corvettes lately.
Agreed.
Within the first couple of weeks of getting my new daily driver, I was still used to my old manual. A guy coming up from behind me on the highway was veering from lane to lane and swerved into my lane from the left going about 20 mph faster than me on his way into the lane to my right. I was pretty sure that he misjudged the distance and was about to clip my passenger side rear corner so I did what came naturally to me. I steered a bit to my left and floored it to get whatever space i could get from a fraction of a second’s worth of acceleration in top gear. Instead, I got a downshift that didn’t finish until the guy had safely transited to the lane to my right. Maybe he would have missed me even if I had done nothing. Maybe the evasive steering helped enough to give him the space he needed. I do know, however, that the ill-timed downshift cost me a few inches of space I didn’t want to lose.
Haven’t driven one since the mid 90’s. The anti-theft aspect I guess is appealing, but, while I have gotten my car broken into, nobody’s stolen the car. I guess at the time it “felt cool” to shift through the gears, but I pretty much forfeited that since I bought my first minivan.
A new clutch is far less extensive of a repair job than a new transmission. The parts of a clutch are very simple.
There is no such nanny/nagging feature on my 230i, and I would be reluctant to buy such a car if you couldn’t turn off that option.
This is not something that is chirping or beeping at you. It’s just a readout that says what gear you’re in, and then an arrow with what gear it suggests you should be in. So, it might read 3>5. There’s nothing nagging or annoying about it, unless you drive staring at your dashboard, and even then, I’m not entirely sure why it would be annoying.
I had one in my Saturn years ago. It wasn’t nagging, just another piece of information.
Yeah, my Hyundai Venue has that, too. It isn’t annoying, and in fact it is kind of amusing as I’m almost always at least one gear lower than it thinks I should be (except on the highway, of course). Guess I’m a torque-whore.
I am blessed/cursed with excellent peripheral vision. 
Maybe I could adjust to having that feature, and even lane deviance warnings.
Maybe not.