It’s always entertaining to take my wife’s manual-shift Civic SI to the shop, and watch the young employees huddle up to figure out how to move to the holding area. My daughter insists we can’t sell it because she wants her first car to be a stick. So there’s definitely some prestige/fun factor.
For myself, riding in a car is the most boring chore imaginable. Don’t enjoy automatics, will never buy FSD. Long highway driving is a diifferent story, but I do mainly short suburban hops where you can never really zone out and focus on (for example) an audiobook. Feeling connection with the machinery, mastering the art of picking the right gear for the right situation, it’s not my preferred form of entertainment, but it’s a nice distraction from a chore that’s otherwise the bane of my existence.
My daughter texted me last night thanking me for teaching her to drive a stick. Every car she’s owned so far has been a manual transmission.
Last weekend a friend of theirs asked if they could drive his car home from an event. He actually asked my daughter’s husband. Thing is, it was a stick and my daughter was the only one in their group who could drive one.
I’m glad this wasn’t the case when I learned to drive. Learning to drive with a manual transmission doesn’t make you a better driver, it just makes your driving experience more needlessly complicated.
And this kind of attitude that I tend to see from manual fans, like you aren’t a real driver unless you know how to drive a manual vehicle well, does nothing but make me glad they are disappearing from the market.
I agree. When I did my drivers test, there was no requirement that I do a manual, and the car my school used for drivers ed was an automatic. When I took my test, it was an automatic.
I don’t think my parents ever had a manual, from the time I first starting asking how cars worked. I can only remember automatics in our driveway.
That’s a lifetime of only using automatics. I think it’s time to drop the attitude that you’re not a real driver if you can’t use a standard.
Same here. I took my test in an automatic, and when I think back on it, none of the vehicles my parents owned growing up were manual either. So I had almost no experience with them in my life before I was forced to learn how to operate them. And then wondered why people put themselves through such frustration when they don’t have to.
When I took my test I had no choice but to use the family car. It was a manual transmission van. When the cop got in, he looked at me and laughed. I passed, but he told me I technically touched a line during my three point turn, but that he wasn’t sure he could have done any better.
They exist in Denmark. If you take your test in an automatic geared car, you are only allowed to drive automatic. Do you take the test in a manual, you can drive automatic too.
Same here as well. My parents only ever had automatic transmission cars, as far as I can recall. The first time I saw manual transmission was when they bought a Ford Pinto for my two oldest brothers to share.
By the time I was learning to drive, the Pinto was no longer around - I honestly don’t recall what happened to it; likely my oldest brother sold it when he graduated and got a real job.
My other brother ALSO had a Pinto - not long after the parents bought the first one, brother #2 WON one in a raffle. So for a while, the household had TWO blue Pintos parked in the driveway. The newer one was a station wagon, otherwise there’d have been loads of fun with trying to take the wrong car.
I tried to teach my youngest on a stickshift. He has no resilience so when he stalled it twice, he announced that no one in the modern world needs to know how to drive a manual and refused to learn on one.
Too late. It was the knees that went, a bit more than two decades ago. I had learned to drive on a stick shift station wagon and kept driving stick until then.
Is there data to support my guess manual cars are both stolen less often and have lower resale value due to the decreasing number of people who are comfortable driving them?
I’d love to buy another manual car (I just sold my little Porsche Boxster a couple weeks ago) but they are becoming increasingly rare, and I find for the sports cars I’m interested in, they cost far more to buy used than the same car in an auto (or a double-clutch with paddle-shifters, which I would consider a good compromise). For example you can get a current generation Porsche Boxster or Cayman for about $40k used, but if you want a stick shift, they are much closer to $60k.
