When I drive, I am one with my vehicle! I have the gear stick up my ass and twerk to change gears, like a MAN!
That's the way my father taught me and his father before him!
Try sitting in traffic for 2 hours with a stick, moving 10 feet at a time, and we can talk about how much you love manual
When people say they prefer driving a manual, the key word there is driving. Sitting in traffic sucks no matter what kind of vehicle you're in.
...i play a game gauging the aggregate flow of traffic and modulating my speed to avoid braking as much as possible; usually resolves to steady motion and as a consequence i don't mind the traffic so much...
People love to say this but it literally doesn't bother me at all. It's no worse than driving an auto in traffic.
Nah, I don't drive a car at all on my regular commute - a 45 minute long bus ride really isn't a big deal to me.
Let's me drive a car I know I'm gonna enjoy while avoiding the worst parts of driving a manual. And as a bonus, I save money on fuel, because bus rides are still cheaper where I live
Exactly why I drive an automatic now. Sure, standard transmissions are fun, if you have a fun car, but my little sedan isn't exactly a fun sports car.
Driving in traffic was annoying with a stick. Never again.
A lot of autos you can use the gear selector to determine what rpm you want it to shift at, or use it to downshift. Most people just throw it in D and wonder what the other selector positions are for.
Also a lot of small manual cars suck for highway driving cause they cruise at a higher rpm. Cruising along at 120kmph at 2k rpm is pretty great.
If that is what it takes for people to demand and use more public transportation, then I am loving it.
(I live near a city and don't need to own a car. I only ever drove manual in the past, and also got stuck in a traffic jam occasionally. IMO it wasn't that difficult to stop and go, but it depends on your car. I had more issues with a rented big transporter, that required to release the clutch while steping on the gas. But that is just practice.
I remember driving a automatic transmission car once for 10 minutes or so, and it was very stressful, because it behaved so different.)
We played by slightly different score system but the ranking seems the same, we also included Old People, and Wheel Chairs / Mobility Scooters, which with your scoring system would be 75 and 100 respectively. Push bikes and prams would be switched as bikes are more common and prams more devastating so they're worth more points. We also had bonus points for pedestrians caught off a cross-walk.
why no banana? fukc you
Fuck you banana dealer
I actually quite enjoy driving, especially at night, really helps me relax and get rid of anxiety. I would love to do a track day, but shits expensive.
See if there are any autocross groups in your area. Cheaper and safer than a track day with 95% of the thrill.
There is an event in April in thinking about signing up for, it's only about 200 bucks to enter and there are other events in the club later if I like it, also just in time for my birthday!
We had a tool for that it was called public transportation
A life time of stop and go traffic on i-35 had me get a auto when my last car died.
I miss my manual transmission sometimes. Though after having an AirBNB in the mountains, I did not miss it. I never want to stop on a hill that steep in a manual.
Or the car will be like "You're creeping forward with your driver's door open? I'm going to slam in to park without even asking first then all my dash lights will be going full xmas mode while I beep incessantly. Because fuck you, that's why."
"Oh no a slight bump in the road. Better shout about it and slam the brakes lmao"
If I'm at a t-intersection with a car parked on the side of the road in front, I'll start turning, car thinks I'm about to t-bone someone, red lights and alarms everywhere. Scares the fucking shit out of me. The first time it happened I slammed the brakes on and fortunately didn't get rear-ended.
That system has never done anything but cause me to almost have an accident and to turn it off is buried away in the settings each time I start the car. And the lane keeping assist is so dumb at understanding how people take an apex on corners, or dealing with the faded lines. "Give me the fucking wheel back!" tugLURCH "Fuck!"
It's like learning to drive with my hyper-anxious mother in the passenger seat all over again, flipping out and unexpectedly trying to intervine over nothing she thought was something.
Which make and model is this?
MY22 Subaru WRX tS
I've experienced the atrocious lane following behavior in multiple models of Jeep and Chevrolet vehicles.
I'm so glad to see I'm not the only one with issues with those "driver nanny" systems, as I call them. The one in our Mazda regularly false alarms in left turn lanes, and occasionally triggers on signposts and shit while turning right. I had to turn off the lane assist; the damn thing kept steering me back toward obstacles I was actively trying to avoid (I guess I'm "supposed" to swerve to avoid them, but that was not how I learned to drive - swerving is something that should be done only in an emergency, and an obstacle I can see well ahead isn't an emergency). The emergency braking alarm is occasionally triggered by cars parked along the road on a curve.
It doesn't help that the alarm in that car is like nails on a chalkboard to me - it just instantly pisses me off. Why can't it just be a nice little chime or something? Unfortunately, we didn't hear the alarm until we were getting the overview from the salesman during delivery - during the test drive, the salesman had started it without us there and drove it to the door, and we just hopped in, then we didn't trigger it during the test drive. The first time I heard it was when I started the car during delivery - "WHAT IS THAT NOISE?" Salesman: "Oh it's just the driver seat belt alarm." "Oh." Then a few days later, on our way to work, it gave us its first false alarm, and I almost hit the brakes because I thought there was something seriously wrong with the car and I should stop driving it. Nope, it was just misinterpreting the situation.
It's to the point where I will only drive the car on local trips - if we're going out of town, I will take the pickup. It's more expensive to drive, but so much more comfortable, and it doesn't have blaring alarms screeching at me.
Unfortunately I think practically all cars these days have that shit, so I won't have any options when my wife finally lets me get rid of the Mazda. In my ideal world, we'd buy a 2016 Honda Accord V6 (the last year they made them with V6 engines) and just keep that running forever. However, I doubt my wife would agree to that plan.
I would REALLY like to see the crash statistics for those cars. Theoretically the frequency and/or severity of crashes should be reduced, right? But road fatalities are up the last few years...which may indicate those safety features aren't helping, or maybe they're making people too confident, or maybe they are helping and the situation would be even worse without them. But no one seems to have that info.
Some of it must be regulatory... car chimes when you open the door and stuff I know is NA-only, even brand new cars in Europe know to STFU unless they have something actually meaningful to say. In my experience even the seat belt alarm doesn't turn on under a certain speed (somewhere around 10-15 km/h on my car I think, at least it shuts the fuck up when maneuvering in a parking lot).
False alarms on the nannies is highly brand dependent. On my 2018 VW I've had it freak out maybe 10 times over 60k km, it's rare and almost every time it was understandable why it would freak out (and never did it actually hit the brakes for me for a false alarm). So I've never felt the need to disable the nannies.
I don't mind the alarms for things that are actually issues - open the door and the keys are in the ignition, or I left the lights on, or even the seat belt reminder when I start the car. But when I'm rolling along and everything is fine, a loud screeching alarm out of nowhere is extremely disturbing...and doubly so when I realize that there was actually nothing I was doing wrong. It really is like having a backseat driver screaming at me, and it pisses me off. I have screamed at the car to shut the fuck up on a few occasions. God I hate it.
And, I promise, I'm not driving aggressively or anything like that to trigger this shit. I'm really not. I'm a pretty careful driver; our other car is from 1999 - I bought it new and still own it and drive it, so I must be doing something correctly. I'm not saying I never make mistakes, either. I just try to keep them small enough to not have huge consequences.
Yes, one time I did get a little close to the vehicle in front of me that was turning and triggered the BRAKE alarm (not the actual brakes, just the alarm)...okay, I don't do that any more. But I think that might be the ONLY time it has actually alerted me somewhat correctly...and even then things were well under control and I wasn't going to hit them; it was just closer than it liked. The rest of the time...it's like "I know more than you."
I understand some people are busy doing other things instead of driving and need that stuff. Fine, they can have it. But why do I have to pay to have it in my car? And any minor crash is going to cost that much more to repair, too.
Yeah I have screamed at the car a few times as well for backseat driving (and I'm also someone who disables the satnav voice because I hate being interrupted by someone yelling at me), but at least with VW it's extremely infrequent despite having driven quite aggressively for a couple years before I stopped commuting by car.
It just take one time of it slamming the brakes for one pedestrian to make up for it 100 times over, so I'm fine with it.
(Also specifically the minor crashes will not break the emergency braking systems thankfully, AFAIK it's made up of a battery of sensors on top of the windshield, a computer, and hooks into the braking system alongside the ABS/ESP)
You might be right about the sensors. All I know was that we were in an extremely heavy rainstorm - a time when it would have been nice to have the lane assist - and the system was like, "Ha. I'm useless here and shutting down. You're on your own!" I was assuming some sensors in the bumper or whatever were overwhelmed, but a camera-based system might explain that, too.
I actually was a real advocate for gears, then I drove my wife's new car for some time. Modern automatic isn't only comfortable, it's actually more (fuel) efficient, especially in the city. Now I'm an automatic guy. And - the circle of life - my daughter, looking for her first car this year: "No, I want gears!" Now she's got gears. In a car that weighs less than my phone, but hey, what do I old 🥔 potato know.
I'm resigned that manual transmissons are a thing of the past, but man, it's such a huge part of the enjoyment of driving for me.
Getting that perfect shift, especially if accelerating quicky or going up a steep hill is just so satisfying... Or the "minigame" of balancing the clutch and throttle from a full stop uphill without using the handbrake... And that feeling when you smoothly downshift going down a road and the revs pick up, while you ease up on the brake...
Yeah I really like driving.
Learned automatic then later manual out of necessity and this is just nuts to me. People enjoy that? Driving is already fairly obnoxious just getting around traffic and the extra tedium of having to shift gears at every stop and go was awful. This has to be some kind of Stockholm syndrome or nostalgia or something
I'm a computer geek and I always look at it like a computer.
Is a Mac or Windows easier to use? Arguably yes.
Yet I use Linux anyway because I like the full control despite the trade offs. And some tradeoffs I actually prefer
I could just click install on Windows and Mac (and on Linux),, or I can download a program and manually put each of it's constituent files into the correct place in order to run it.
I'm a computer guy and view an automatic as just that: Automation to do away with a needless repetitive task. Not to say that I missed your analogy, but "full control" is an awfully overblown way to put it when it comes to a manual unless you're doing NASCAR or something. Our programmers and engineers know what they're doing. Your car can automatically shift gears and do more than well enough to get you to work and back.
My attention drifts too much when I drive auto, I prefer the extra thinking and functions that manual driving needs.
For those with a similar view on the subject, keep in mind motorcycles are still almost exclusively manual shift in North America, so when stick shift is basically dead, there is somewhere to go, technically.
Yeah they've been more fuel efficient for awhile now, but you can take my 6 speed from my cold dead hands 🤣
I just like it.
I have an auto truck because I needed a truck and that was what was available for the price I wanted to pay, but my daily driver is a stick and imma drive it till one of us dies lol
Word. I give not a single fuck that modern autos are more efficient and quicker than manuals. They are boring as hell. If I ever switch to an automatic, it will be because I’ve switched to something electrified and manuals are altogether gone.
I say this as someone who has dealt with the stop-go traffic on a daily basis.
Should have put her into an old SAAB. I'm talking pre-'92, before GM bought them. They had gears, power, and speed. They also weighed over 2 tons, and are insanely safe. I've crashed several on the track, and walk away with scratches every time. It's a really expensive hobby at times.
That's a myth, new cars are much safer, like insanely so. It's not even close.
Yup, this is fact, no arguments here.
But it doesn't feel this way though, because new cars kinda... crumple... in a crash.
I get that it's how they protect the driver, by deforming and absorbing the energy instead of just thrusting all into the occupants, but really makes them feel flimsy, compared to those olds hunks of steel.
I'd rather be alive in a crumpled wreck that dead in a barely dented tank though.
I had a car with push button start and a CVT. After putting the first 50 miles on the car, the brake light switch died. Nissan, in their ultimate wisdom, used the brake light switch to tell the computer if you are pressing the brake when starting the car. Well, no brake light switch, no starting the engine. Had to get it towed back to the dealership to get fixed.
I now have a real key and a manual transmission.
Jokes on you, some manual cars also require the brake to be pressed to start them.
Clutch pedal as well, so you have 2x as many switches to go bad and strand you if you don't know how to bypass.
Yes, I had an older manual car that had this. But it was a mechanical release of the ignition lock connected to the brake pedal.
You know I think your mistake here was buying a Nissan, not a car with push button start
I used to have a 92 Honda accord. The car was built on par with Toyota as far as reliability. With that said though, there was one time it wouldn't start. Push started it, it worked,, but when starting- the problem persisted. Went to a shop to diagnose it. Turns out manual cars normally use a clutch switch to tell if you have the clutch pressed to start the car. There is a little rubber standoff on it to dampen the clutch pedal coming back up and hitting it, making it last longer. The little rubber bit fell out and got lodged making the switch not disengage. It was a 10 cent part that cost me an hour of diagnostic time (the minimum). So yes, manual cars still have an equivalent problem to what you had.
Clearly the CVT is the real villain here.
On a Nissan CVT? absolutely.
Jatco CVTs are in more cars than Nissans unfortunately
I drive manual, it's great for my ADHD haha keeps me from fucking around inside my car in traffic.
That being said, the person who made this needs to calm down. It's not that serious.
its a meme
And it's on /c/shitpost. I don't think op has the problem with taking things seriously.
I feel that for sure haha, it's so much more enjoyable for me and honestly I think it makes people better drivers.
Manual transmission is also a great anti-theft device, since most kids don't know how to drive it.
Funny, when I was in the military all the Gen X'ers couldn't drive stick when we got rentals in Europe. I could because I rode a motorcycle, so I just always drove.
My own purely anecdotal observation is that there are still far more of us Xers who know how to drive a manual transmission. One good thing about it, for my wife and I at least, is that our gen Z kids never asked to borrow our cars and just bought their own automatics or borrowed from their grandparents.
My wife's car has an especially fiendish hydraulic clutch that will stall out if you even look at it funny, so that helped too.
That's an American problem. In Europe nearly everyone knows how to drive manually.
If it weren't for America, BMW and Mercedes wouldn't be selling a single manual transmission vehicle anymore.
What manual Mercedes is for sale in the USA? I've never seen one, that could be a whole lot of fun!
lmao
Instead of laughing, perhaps you'd like to see how many manual transmission models are sold under those two brands in Europe. Now do the same for the US.
CARS are not just about driving, they're about mastering the ART of machinery!
Want to feel alive on a steep hill? Forget simplicity, EMBRACE the handbrake juggle and the dance of the clutch pedal!
"I could simply shift to D, but where's the thrill in that?" - A call to arms by the Connoisseurs of Complexity.
DEFEND your right to a gearbox that requires three limbs and a keen sense of timing to operate!
CELEBRATE MANUAL TRANSMISSIONS
(These are the cryptic contraptions deciphered only by the Worthy)
ZIGZAG MAZE? - Challenge accepted!
VOLUME KNOB? - Twist and shout your way through the gears!
???????? - Only the true driver knows!
"Please engage the starter motor." - "Certainly, after I adjust the choke and check the distributor!"
"I fear no hill start, for I have the power of the clutch and the arcane knowledge of the gearbox!"
Join the ranks of those who drive not for convenience, but for the pure, unadulterated challenge."
Don't worry, AI transmission works most of the time (but every now and then it may hallucinate on the highway...)
Why is AI allowed to do that and when I'm driving on shrooms I'll loose my license. Seems unfair to me.
Hallucinogens for everyone!
Does anybody have the version of this about roads, intersections and such? I've been trying to find it but don't really know what to search
Real men use steam. What is with your prissy internal combustion engines? Shovel coal like a real driver.
Real men also don't fuck around with soft rubber or asphalt. We use steel wheels on steel rails set atop a bed of rugged timber and jagged rocks!
As someone studying tech, yes please, give me the dummest most rudimentary car with no computer or servos. I don't want general motors to gather my biometrics or a script kiddy to disable my steering. Dumb technology is best always. Fuck that android auto bs or whatever abomination the manufacturer adds. Just want a speaker with an aux cord so I can listen to my flacs
I love the idea of a sound system that is just an aux cord to a speaker
If I ever win the lottery, I'm hiring a 50 people like you to build an incredibly basic production car together. Make it barely or technically meet the modern technology standards to be road legal in all 50 states, but use the simplest mechanical solution to everything a car needs to do. I assume a lot of systems would have to be installed as a "backup" to the electrical version, but I'd want to build it to be able to function perfectly with all the computers disconnected. Probably ship it with instructions phrased as warnings of what not to do.
As long as the price reflects that absolutely. I feel like one of the reasons cars are getting so pricy is because we are filling them with so much bloat. Ex. Heated seats, power windows, tablets. Like, what happened to a base model car?
Yes, I would want the price to reflect the simplicity, and lack of extras should help with that. Let the aftermarket companies do heated seats and fancy stereos.
Open source car? Lol. Design it as easy to aftermarket as possible. Let aftermarket companies sell full seats and ECT. Use only standard connections and hardware
Surely there is an open source car by now. Some sort of street legal kit?
I do think open source car is the best label to describe what I'm dreaming of. But factory built to take advantage of bulk order pricing for the parts and because people who are actually willing and able to put their own car together are rare.
Nope, at least afaik. Prototyping and building cars by hand (without a whole factory set up to build it) is hard. Not to mention extremely expensive. And you have to build multiple (identical) copies of the prototype to get it street legal, because of crash testing. And you have to be able to guarantee that what people build with your kit remains identical to your prototype. Or everyone assembling such a kit would have to build multiple copies of the car and go through the certification process individually.
And of course there are very few people that would want to assemble their own car, so you wouldn't be able to make a business out of it.
I've seen a few builds from scratch online. All of them say it turned out to be far FAR more difficult than they ever imagined. Once the thing works properly, it's up to what state/ country the builder is in to determine how hard or easy it is to get it legal to drive on the road.
I did a moped over a 3 day weekend. That was a lot of fun. The state required me to get a mechanic to sign off on it.
This exists in the motorcycle world, actually. You can buy a 2023 Suzuki DR650. It will have a speedometer, an air cooled 650cc single cylinder engine, and that's it. No ECU, no LED lights, no ABS, nothing. It doesn't even have fuel injection.
In the automotove world there is/was something sort of close to what you're describing. It's called a Mitsubishi Mirage. 3 cylinders making a furious 78 horsepower, gets great mileage, and is absurdly easy to maintain and repair. And ever since they started making the current Mirage in 2014, it has been given so much hate because it's a no-frills economy car. People literally bitch about how you can see a couple of screw heads when you open the door, and cry that it's slower than a Mustang and less luxurious than a Lexus.
So be prepared to hear that when designing a basic car. There are automotive writers and reviewers who are very out of touch, and can't understand that a basic cheap car is a good thing.
Oh absolutely, I'd expect this imaginary car would be an ugly thing, and constantly panned by reviewers. People would be outraged that some nobody burned hundreds of millions in lottery money on a trash looking car. Meanwhile, every mechanic constantly recommends it for a daily driver because it just works and is super easy to fix.
Interesting about the Mirage. Next time I'm looking for a commuter car, I'll have to look for one of those.
Surely the volume knob isn't a real gear stick, right?
2019 Ford Edge
but... it gets worse!
2023 GMC Terrain
That automatic transmission control is really dreamed up by someone utterly deranged.
It's the freemasons
You think that's bad?
May I present the manual transmission on the Ford Edsel:
Yes. Those are transmission buttons on the steering wheel. There's also only two of them when you're actually driving that matter so it might as well be automatic.
is there an airbag?
No.
Ford has some terrible ones. I present the 2019 Lincoln Continental.
They put the radio controls down with the HVAC so they could put the gear selector and parking crap on both sides of the radio.
The eject button is for the cd player. It’s a single slot that loads inside the center console area under the HVAC controls that is open in that pic. Super inconvenient.
That is genuinely awful.
Oh damn I wasn't expecting to see a 2023 car with an AUX port
Range Rovers, unfortunate cars that they are.
Correct; it's not a stick, as it is a knob.
I've driven multiple vehicles with gear selection knobs.
Fuck if I dont miss bump-starting my old ford falcon.
I'm still perplexed by my grandfather driving around in a manual with a beer and a cigarette. Did the WWII generation have a third hand?
Millenial with a manual: you can pull off incredible feats while driving a stick with the right combination of knees and bad decisions.
I don't know how many studies have been done on this, but I have a conspiracy theory that it's a tradeoff for becoming more analytical and STEM minded basically. The number of STEM jobs have exploded in the millennial and gen-z generations, especially in the West where most of this stereotype seems to be concentrated in, which deal more with abstract thinking and memorisation as opposed to working with your hands and very high motor coordination, as is required in things like manufacturing or agriculture. We just don't train our muscle memory as much anymore due to a higher likelihood of not really having to anymore. (Which I guess also implies the inverse of the stereotype of boomers "being stupid" and prone to not thinking of the long term consequences of things being due to a much higher proportion of them working more labour focused jobs where analytical thinking is less important so they could just forget all the things they learned in school. I mean it's surprisingly common too see boomers thinking stuff like "windmills cause cancer" or "vaccines cause autism.")
I also firmly believe that you can get better at both analytical thinking and working with your hands if you make an effort to practice (don't practice by driving distracted though). The brain is highly adaptable regardless of your age or upbringing.
The chauffeur is supposed to be the one dealing with those mechanical details.
Finally someone gets it
I switched from manual to auto after I moved to Reading and found myself constantly dancing the clutch fandango in all the stop start traffic.
When driving an auto I have to be real careful not to try and hit the 'clutch'. Brake checked myself more than once doing that.
Does this guy not know of a handbrake?
Works really well in my automatic car.
Most of not-North-America drive around in manual vehicles. Have to wonder what the allure is of something which is kind of mundane and boring. When I'm driving a manual I'm not thinking I'm Steve McQueen, instead I'm just constantly shifting gears between sets of traffic lights. If people really want to connect with a car, then buy an EV. Instant torque and responsiveness without screwing around with extra sticks and pedals or suffering the rubber banding in some automatics.
It depends on what sort of experience you want, what roads you drive, whether it's mostly country or city, do track running etc.
I like manual more for various reasons. I don't do much city driving nor do I get stock in heavy traffic ques. I drive country roads and highways and do a few track days. With a manual I get a much more satisfying experience, as it requires more skill to make fast and/or smooth shifts. The tactile feel of the manual gear shifter makes me feel more connected to my car. Flappy pads shifting automatic doesn't require the same skill nor has the same tactile feel. It's awesome for city and ques though.
I don't think we have the same idea of what it means to be connected with the car. Most EVs aren't seeking to have you drive them, they are seeking to drive you, imho (except maybe the Hyundai N range thats coming, but only because it tries to manic cars).
I don't see the appeal of manuals. I just want to get from point A to point B, I don't want to have to think about it anymore than necessary. Driving to me is a chore and a hazard.
Hyundai is making an Ioniq 5 N, that can simulate gears and gearchanges so people can still feel like vroooom, vroooooom. You can't make that up.
That's slightly less offensive IMO, than the fact that if you turned the speaker off on a modern ICE Mustang or Corvette, they'd be as quiet as a Prius. This means they could have put the speaker on the EV versions they just released, but they didn't. There's something wrong about a silent Mustang or Corvette.
As a resident in a nice, hilly area: Not really. Traffic can't become silent quickly enough.
Someone bring this sniveling fool to me! I grew up on a farm and when I learned to drive, I started with a 5x3 manual double stick and then "graduated" to a 15 speed. I will have this fool crying in his pablum within a mile.
I'm all for automatics. What transmission you drive does not lessen the driving experience.
Maybe I'm kidding myself but I feel like even if I won the lottery I still wouldn't replace my -07 Nissan Pickup. I'd probably have the thing entirely rebuilt but it's basically my dream car as it is so other than customizing it even more there's nothing newer trucks have that I wish mine did too. The only downside to older vehicles is the increased need for maintenance though I'm much rather fixing a 15 year old truck today than 2023 truck in 2038.
04 Nissan Frontier over here. I specifically bought it because it has a manual transmission which is hard to find in the US. I drove all the way up to Seattle from Portland to get it. There are maintenance issues given its age, but I still love it. Apart from the bullshit bells and whistles, it's still every bit as capable as any new pickup in its class. I've doctored it up a bit over the years, so it's not fully stock anymore.
Yeah I ignored all the automatics aswell. Mine has a 6 speed manual, 4x4, low range and a rear diff lock.
They're called Navara here in Europe. I'm not sure how different it's from Frontier except that it has a 2.5 litre turbo diesel rather than petrol engine. I think it's a damn nice looking truck despite its age and with modifications it can be made to look even better. Mine is all murdered out.
Nice! Mine is a 3.2 liter V6 6 speed manual but w/o the turbo. It has a shitload of torque in 1st and 2nd, but isn't very fast or powerful once it's in third, 4th or 5th gear, which is fine with me.
It also has an extended bed and a canopy with flip-up windows on the sides. I've installed a roof-rack and have lifted the truck 2 inches together with aftermarket shocks and a new set of leaf springs. I've also installed "bullhorns" on the front together with "brush racks" to protect my old headlights.
All in all she's a pretty mean truck. I've taken her out with friends who are hardcore Jeep aficionados, and she's more than acquitted herself.
I've owned 3 automatics in 30 years. I'm going to ride out the apocalypse in my 2-seat 50+ year old, 35mpg manual.
35mpg is like 13l/100km. thats like really bad?
Edit: Lol its more like 9l/100km, still not great tho
Sadly, that's actually on the higher end of the spectrum when it comes to American vehicles
No wonder with all the trucks and SUV
1 gallon is about 3.8 liters. 1 mile is about 1.6km.
35 mi/gal = (35 * 1.6km)/gal = (35 * 1.6km)/3.8l
You want liters per kilometer tho, so reciprocal: 3.8l/(1.6km * 35)
To drive 100 km, you need 100 times the fuel => (3.8l*100)/(1.6km * 35) ~ 6.8 l/100km
I'm getting 6.7l/100 km using Google. Not sure what math you're doing. But keep in mind there are two different gallons, US and Imperial or something. 35 mpg is pretty normal for a gasoline-only car these days (hybrids can do better depending on driving conditions - if they can spend most of their time on battery, for example). Diesel cars aren't much of a thing in the US, again, especially after the whole Volkswagen cheating thing.
I know there used to be diesel cars in the 80s that would get crazy numbers like 50 mpg (4.7l/100km), and gas-powered cars probably could now, too, but emissions and safety requirements have pretty much killed that.
I really shouldn't do math in my head...
I looked up the 9ish, but not sure what calculator that was. I do get to 6.7 now too, so that is really not that bad.
I was starting to wonder what kind of cars you guys have that get such incredible fuel economy. :)
Yeah, but it's 50 years old. 12 was the average, and you really didn't see anything getting better that 25. That's on older roads with leaded gas and bias tires.
I don't drive a car that needs detonating dino-dhiarrea anymore. And BEVs only habe one gear. So there's that.
You drive a car that indirectly needs dino-dhiarrea. Only moved the problem one step.
Nope. I pay a bit extra for electricity from renewables.
You could argue that the stuff that comes out of the socket still is the energy-mix that is produced at the time, but my invoice says something along the lines of "x kWh of electricity generated from renewable sources" and x kWh of electricity from renewable sources will have been fed into the grid over the time frame covered by my invoice. Good enough for me.
I could argue which energy source has been used to produce those panels and the battery, extract the materials, etc.
Not really. Do you need energy to produce those things? Yes. But how much dino-energy can be saved during the livetime of those products? Way more!
Batteries that need to be disposed of and replaced...this is not a solution.
Baby electric vehicles
I love dino diarrhea, that's my kink
handbrake starts are useless if you live literally anywhere with significant hills/slopes and traffic lol
You gotta learn to just give the proper gas to clutch ratio, otherwise you'll be holding up traffic anytime you want to move forward
Of course you have to have the proper gas to clutch ratio, Unless you mean just never using the brake. If it's steep enough, your foot still has to move from the brake to the gas. If the hill is steep, and the person behind you is riding your ass, you may very well roll back enough to hit them in the time it takes to move your foot from brake to gas. Which is why you'd need to use the hand brake to give yourself the time to move your foot to gas, then get the right ratio, and release the hand brake.
Was gonna explain, but SugarSnack already said it.
You hold the clutch at the bite point before you even reach the gas.
It takes practice, but even on the steeper hills it works fine. It all happens in under a second and you're off.
Cars that auto throttle with clutch make this even easier to do because you don't have to worry about stalling either.
In the UK you do hill starts as a part of the driving test. They're not useless because if you don't know how to do it, then you're going to roll back or cut out when you start off and that's a fail. Plenty of places have roads and hills. Hence why they're part of the test. Typically, you apply the parking brake, release the clutch enough to "bite" and hold you in place, release the brake and continue to release the clutch as you press on the accelerator. All in a controlled fashion.
Of course, fancier cars have hill start assist and electronic parking brakes these days so I don't know what happens if you show up for your test in one of those - they probably just do the test anyway because I'm sure people still manage to screw up.
Car what car what is a car ah a horse carriage you mean
What is a what now hello
I LIKE MY CARS LIKE MY MEAT
RAAAAAW
My favorite car ever was my 1986 Toyota Corolla manual. It was my mom's first and then I inherited it in the late 90s. The tire rod snapped one day and it slammed into a parked car. I was more devastated about losing the car than I was what it would cost me in damages.
I drive an automatic now. A Prius. I don't regret it because it's a really good car and was a really good investment in terms of savings on gas, but I do miss that Corolla and I really miss the feeling of control I had when I drove a manual.
I had a Datsun 280zx that I roll started for about a year before it rolled as far down the hill as it would go one time without starting. The car is still sitting at that spot 20-something years later.
When I drive, I am one with my vehicle! I have the gear stick up my ass and twerk to change gears, like a MAN!
That's the way my father taught me and his father before him!
Try sitting in traffic for 2 hours with a stick, moving 10 feet at a time, and we can talk about how much you love manual
When people say they prefer driving a manual, the key word there is driving. Sitting in traffic sucks no matter what kind of vehicle you're in.
...i play a game gauging the aggregate flow of traffic and modulating my speed to avoid braking as much as possible; usually resolves to steady motion and as a consequence i don't mind the traffic so much...
People love to say this but it literally doesn't bother me at all. It's no worse than driving an auto in traffic.
Nah, I don't drive a car at all on my regular commute - a 45 minute long bus ride really isn't a big deal to me.
Let's me drive a car I know I'm gonna enjoy while avoiding the worst parts of driving a manual. And as a bonus, I save money on fuel, because bus rides are still cheaper where I live
Exactly why I drive an automatic now. Sure, standard transmissions are fun, if you have a fun car, but my little sedan isn't exactly a fun sports car.
Driving in traffic was annoying with a stick. Never again.
A lot of autos you can use the gear selector to determine what rpm you want it to shift at, or use it to downshift. Most people just throw it in D and wonder what the other selector positions are for.
Also a lot of small manual cars suck for highway driving cause they cruise at a higher rpm. Cruising along at 120kmph at 2k rpm is pretty great.
If that is what it takes for people to demand and use more public transportation, then I am loving it.
(I live near a city and don't need to own a car. I only ever drove manual in the past, and also got stuck in a traffic jam occasionally. IMO it wasn't that difficult to stop and go, but it depends on your car. I had more issues with a rented big transporter, that required to release the clutch while steping on the gas. But that is just practice.
I remember driving a automatic transmission car once for 10 minutes or so, and it was very stressful, because it behaved so different.)
Cars aren't about driving. You want to drive? Go to the track.
Cars are about getting from point A to point B. Bring on full automation please!
Cars are about running down pedestrians, taking up space, eating hot chip and lie
What was the pedestrian points system again?
Were there any others?
Go hit and run and rack up those points now!
https://youtu.be/F2GEKV1dOgY
For the uninformed.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/F2GEKV1dOgY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
We played by slightly different score system but the ranking seems the same, we also included Old People, and Wheel Chairs / Mobility Scooters, which with your scoring system would be 75 and 100 respectively. Push bikes and prams would be switched as bikes are more common and prams more devastating so they're worth more points. We also had bonus points for pedestrians caught off a cross-walk.
why no banana? fukc you
Fuck you banana dealer
I actually quite enjoy driving, especially at night, really helps me relax and get rid of anxiety. I would love to do a track day, but shits expensive.
See if there are any autocross groups in your area. Cheaper and safer than a track day with 95% of the thrill.
There is an event in April in thinking about signing up for, it's only about 200 bucks to enter and there are other events in the club later if I like it, also just in time for my birthday!
We had a tool for that it was called public transportation
A life time of stop and go traffic on i-35 had me get a auto when my last car died.
I miss my manual transmission sometimes. Though after having an AirBNB in the mountains, I did not miss it. I never want to stop on a hill that steep in a manual.
Or the car will be like "You're creeping forward with your driver's door open? I'm going to slam in to park without even asking first then all my dash lights will be going full xmas mode while I beep incessantly. Because fuck you, that's why."
"Oh no a slight bump in the road. Better shout about it and slam the brakes lmao"
If I'm at a t-intersection with a car parked on the side of the road in front, I'll start turning, car thinks I'm about to t-bone someone, red lights and alarms everywhere. Scares the fucking shit out of me. The first time it happened I slammed the brakes on and fortunately didn't get rear-ended.
That system has never done anything but cause me to almost have an accident and to turn it off is buried away in the settings each time I start the car. And the lane keeping assist is so dumb at understanding how people take an apex on corners, or dealing with the faded lines. "Give me the fucking wheel back!" tug LURCH "Fuck!"
It's like learning to drive with my hyper-anxious mother in the passenger seat all over again, flipping out and unexpectedly trying to intervine over nothing she thought was something.
Which make and model is this?
MY22 Subaru WRX tS
I've experienced the atrocious lane following behavior in multiple models of Jeep and Chevrolet vehicles.
I'm so glad to see I'm not the only one with issues with those "driver nanny" systems, as I call them. The one in our Mazda regularly false alarms in left turn lanes, and occasionally triggers on signposts and shit while turning right. I had to turn off the lane assist; the damn thing kept steering me back toward obstacles I was actively trying to avoid (I guess I'm "supposed" to swerve to avoid them, but that was not how I learned to drive - swerving is something that should be done only in an emergency, and an obstacle I can see well ahead isn't an emergency). The emergency braking alarm is occasionally triggered by cars parked along the road on a curve.
It doesn't help that the alarm in that car is like nails on a chalkboard to me - it just instantly pisses me off. Why can't it just be a nice little chime or something? Unfortunately, we didn't hear the alarm until we were getting the overview from the salesman during delivery - during the test drive, the salesman had started it without us there and drove it to the door, and we just hopped in, then we didn't trigger it during the test drive. The first time I heard it was when I started the car during delivery - "WHAT IS THAT NOISE?" Salesman: "Oh it's just the driver seat belt alarm." "Oh." Then a few days later, on our way to work, it gave us its first false alarm, and I almost hit the brakes because I thought there was something seriously wrong with the car and I should stop driving it. Nope, it was just misinterpreting the situation.
It's to the point where I will only drive the car on local trips - if we're going out of town, I will take the pickup. It's more expensive to drive, but so much more comfortable, and it doesn't have blaring alarms screeching at me.
Unfortunately I think practically all cars these days have that shit, so I won't have any options when my wife finally lets me get rid of the Mazda. In my ideal world, we'd buy a 2016 Honda Accord V6 (the last year they made them with V6 engines) and just keep that running forever. However, I doubt my wife would agree to that plan.
I would REALLY like to see the crash statistics for those cars. Theoretically the frequency and/or severity of crashes should be reduced, right? But road fatalities are up the last few years...which may indicate those safety features aren't helping, or maybe they're making people too confident, or maybe they are helping and the situation would be even worse without them. But no one seems to have that info.
Some of it must be regulatory... car chimes when you open the door and stuff I know is NA-only, even brand new cars in Europe know to STFU unless they have something actually meaningful to say. In my experience even the seat belt alarm doesn't turn on under a certain speed (somewhere around 10-15 km/h on my car I think, at least it shuts the fuck up when maneuvering in a parking lot).
False alarms on the nannies is highly brand dependent. On my 2018 VW I've had it freak out maybe 10 times over 60k km, it's rare and almost every time it was understandable why it would freak out (and never did it actually hit the brakes for me for a false alarm). So I've never felt the need to disable the nannies.
I don't mind the alarms for things that are actually issues - open the door and the keys are in the ignition, or I left the lights on, or even the seat belt reminder when I start the car. But when I'm rolling along and everything is fine, a loud screeching alarm out of nowhere is extremely disturbing...and doubly so when I realize that there was actually nothing I was doing wrong. It really is like having a backseat driver screaming at me, and it pisses me off. I have screamed at the car to shut the fuck up on a few occasions. God I hate it.
And, I promise, I'm not driving aggressively or anything like that to trigger this shit. I'm really not. I'm a pretty careful driver; our other car is from 1999 - I bought it new and still own it and drive it, so I must be doing something correctly. I'm not saying I never make mistakes, either. I just try to keep them small enough to not have huge consequences.
Yes, one time I did get a little close to the vehicle in front of me that was turning and triggered the BRAKE alarm (not the actual brakes, just the alarm)...okay, I don't do that any more. But I think that might be the ONLY time it has actually alerted me somewhat correctly...and even then things were well under control and I wasn't going to hit them; it was just closer than it liked. The rest of the time...it's like "I know more than you."
I understand some people are busy doing other things instead of driving and need that stuff. Fine, they can have it. But why do I have to pay to have it in my car? And any minor crash is going to cost that much more to repair, too.
Yeah I have screamed at the car a few times as well for backseat driving (and I'm also someone who disables the satnav voice because I hate being interrupted by someone yelling at me), but at least with VW it's extremely infrequent despite having driven quite aggressively for a couple years before I stopped commuting by car.
It just take one time of it slamming the brakes for one pedestrian to make up for it 100 times over, so I'm fine with it.
(Also specifically the minor crashes will not break the emergency braking systems thankfully, AFAIK it's made up of a battery of sensors on top of the windshield, a computer, and hooks into the braking system alongside the ABS/ESP)
You might be right about the sensors. All I know was that we were in an extremely heavy rainstorm - a time when it would have been nice to have the lane assist - and the system was like, "Ha. I'm useless here and shutting down. You're on your own!" I was assuming some sensors in the bumper or whatever were overwhelmed, but a camera-based system might explain that, too.
And "BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!" Applied corrective steering to prevent a collision
When you follow the curve of a road with an edge barrier just a little later than it would have (Tesla)
I actually was a real advocate for gears, then I drove my wife's new car for some time. Modern automatic isn't only comfortable, it's actually more (fuel) efficient, especially in the city. Now I'm an automatic guy. And - the circle of life - my daughter, looking for her first car this year: "No, I want gears!" Now she's got gears. In a car that weighs less than my phone, but hey, what do I old 🥔 potato know.
I'm resigned that manual transmissons are a thing of the past, but man, it's such a huge part of the enjoyment of driving for me.
Getting that perfect shift, especially if accelerating quicky or going up a steep hill is just so satisfying... Or the "minigame" of balancing the clutch and throttle from a full stop uphill without using the handbrake... And that feeling when you smoothly downshift going down a road and the revs pick up, while you ease up on the brake...
Yeah I really like driving.
Learned automatic then later manual out of necessity and this is just nuts to me. People enjoy that? Driving is already fairly obnoxious just getting around traffic and the extra tedium of having to shift gears at every stop and go was awful. This has to be some kind of Stockholm syndrome or nostalgia or something
I'm a computer geek and I always look at it like a computer. Is a Mac or Windows easier to use? Arguably yes.
Yet I use Linux anyway because I like the full control despite the trade offs. And some tradeoffs I actually prefer
I could just click install on Windows and Mac (and on Linux),, or I can download a program and manually put each of it's constituent files into the correct place in order to run it.
I'm a computer guy and view an automatic as just that: Automation to do away with a needless repetitive task. Not to say that I missed your analogy, but "full control" is an awfully overblown way to put it when it comes to a manual unless you're doing NASCAR or something. Our programmers and engineers know what they're doing. Your car can automatically shift gears and do more than well enough to get you to work and back.
My attention drifts too much when I drive auto, I prefer the extra thinking and functions that manual driving needs.
For those with a similar view on the subject, keep in mind motorcycles are still almost exclusively manual shift in North America, so when stick shift is basically dead, there is somewhere to go, technically.
Yeah they've been more fuel efficient for awhile now, but you can take my 6 speed from my cold dead hands 🤣
I just like it.
I have an auto truck because I needed a truck and that was what was available for the price I wanted to pay, but my daily driver is a stick and imma drive it till one of us dies lol
Word. I give not a single fuck that modern autos are more efficient and quicker than manuals. They are boring as hell. If I ever switch to an automatic, it will be because I’ve switched to something electrified and manuals are altogether gone.
I say this as someone who has dealt with the stop-go traffic on a daily basis.
Should have put her into an old SAAB. I'm talking pre-'92, before GM bought them. They had gears, power, and speed. They also weighed over 2 tons, and are insanely safe. I've crashed several on the track, and walk away with scratches every time. It's a really expensive hobby at times.
That's a myth, new cars are much safer, like insanely so. It's not even close.
Yup, this is fact, no arguments here.
But it doesn't feel this way though, because new cars kinda... crumple... in a crash.
I get that it's how they protect the driver, by deforming and absorbing the energy instead of just thrusting all into the occupants, but really makes them feel flimsy, compared to those olds hunks of steel.
I'd rather be alive in a crumpled wreck that dead in a barely dented tank though.
I had a car with push button start and a CVT. After putting the first 50 miles on the car, the brake light switch died. Nissan, in their ultimate wisdom, used the brake light switch to tell the computer if you are pressing the brake when starting the car. Well, no brake light switch, no starting the engine. Had to get it towed back to the dealership to get fixed.
I now have a real key and a manual transmission.
Jokes on you, some manual cars also require the brake to be pressed to start them.
Clutch pedal as well, so you have 2x as many switches to go bad and strand you if you don't know how to bypass.
Yes, I had an older manual car that had this. But it was a mechanical release of the ignition lock connected to the brake pedal.
You know I think your mistake here was buying a Nissan, not a car with push button start
I used to have a 92 Honda accord. The car was built on par with Toyota as far as reliability. With that said though, there was one time it wouldn't start. Push started it, it worked,, but when starting- the problem persisted. Went to a shop to diagnose it. Turns out manual cars normally use a clutch switch to tell if you have the clutch pressed to start the car. There is a little rubber standoff on it to dampen the clutch pedal coming back up and hitting it, making it last longer. The little rubber bit fell out and got lodged making the switch not disengage. It was a 10 cent part that cost me an hour of diagnostic time (the minimum). So yes, manual cars still have an equivalent problem to what you had.
Clearly the CVT is the real villain here.
On a Nissan CVT? absolutely.
Jatco CVTs are in more cars than Nissans unfortunately
Your mistake was buying a nissan
*Modern Nissan.
I genuinely believe the K24 is the second best engine ever made, even better than the 22RE.
Better that than having people ram into you because you have no brake lights
I drive manual, it's great for my ADHD haha keeps me from fucking around inside my car in traffic.
That being said, the person who made this needs to calm down. It's not that serious.
its a meme
And it's on /c/shitpost. I don't think op has the problem with taking things seriously.
I feel that for sure haha, it's so much more enjoyable for me and honestly I think it makes people better drivers.
Manual transmission is also a great anti-theft device, since most kids don't know how to drive it.
Funny, when I was in the military all the Gen X'ers couldn't drive stick when we got rentals in Europe. I could because I rode a motorcycle, so I just always drove.
My own purely anecdotal observation is that there are still far more of us Xers who know how to drive a manual transmission. One good thing about it, for my wife and I at least, is that our gen Z kids never asked to borrow our cars and just bought their own automatics or borrowed from their grandparents.
My wife's car has an especially fiendish hydraulic clutch that will stall out if you even look at it funny, so that helped too.
That's an American problem. In Europe nearly everyone knows how to drive manually.
If it weren't for America, BMW and Mercedes wouldn't be selling a single manual transmission vehicle anymore.
What manual Mercedes is for sale in the USA? I've never seen one, that could be a whole lot of fun!
lmao
Instead of laughing, perhaps you'd like to see how many manual transmission models are sold under those two brands in Europe. Now do the same for the US.
"EMBRACE THE COMPLEXITY OF MANUAL TRANSMISSION
CELEBRATE MANUAL TRANSMISSIONS (These are the cryptic contraptions deciphered only by the Worthy)
ZIGZAG MAZE? - Challenge accepted! VOLUME KNOB? - Twist and shout your way through the gears! ???????? - Only the true driver knows!
"Please engage the starter motor." - "Certainly, after I adjust the choke and check the distributor!" "I fear no hill start, for I have the power of the clutch and the arcane knowledge of the gearbox!"
Join the ranks of those who drive not for convenience, but for the pure, unadulterated challenge."
Don't worry, AI transmission works most of the time (but every now and then it may hallucinate on the highway...)
Why is AI allowed to do that and when I'm driving on shrooms I'll loose my license. Seems unfair to me. Hallucinogens for everyone!
Does anybody have the version of this about roads, intersections and such? I've been trying to find it but don't really know what to search
This one?
YES, thank you!
I can't find it sorry
Real men use steam. What is with your prissy internal combustion engines? Shovel coal like a real driver.
Real men also don't fuck around with soft rubber or asphalt. We use steel wheels on steel rails set atop a bed of rugged timber and jagged rocks!
As someone studying tech, yes please, give me the dummest most rudimentary car with no computer or servos. I don't want general motors to gather my biometrics or a script kiddy to disable my steering. Dumb technology is best always. Fuck that android auto bs or whatever abomination the manufacturer adds. Just want a speaker with an aux cord so I can listen to my flacs
I love the idea of a sound system that is just an aux cord to a speaker
If I ever win the lottery, I'm hiring a 50 people like you to build an incredibly basic production car together. Make it barely or technically meet the modern technology standards to be road legal in all 50 states, but use the simplest mechanical solution to everything a car needs to do. I assume a lot of systems would have to be installed as a "backup" to the electrical version, but I'd want to build it to be able to function perfectly with all the computers disconnected. Probably ship it with instructions phrased as warnings of what not to do.
As long as the price reflects that absolutely. I feel like one of the reasons cars are getting so pricy is because we are filling them with so much bloat. Ex. Heated seats, power windows, tablets. Like, what happened to a base model car?
Yes, I would want the price to reflect the simplicity, and lack of extras should help with that. Let the aftermarket companies do heated seats and fancy stereos.
Open source car? Lol. Design it as easy to aftermarket as possible. Let aftermarket companies sell full seats and ECT. Use only standard connections and hardware
Surely there is an open source car by now. Some sort of street legal kit?
I do think open source car is the best label to describe what I'm dreaming of. But factory built to take advantage of bulk order pricing for the parts and because people who are actually willing and able to put their own car together are rare.
Nope, at least afaik. Prototyping and building cars by hand (without a whole factory set up to build it) is hard. Not to mention extremely expensive. And you have to build multiple (identical) copies of the prototype to get it street legal, because of crash testing. And you have to be able to guarantee that what people build with your kit remains identical to your prototype. Or everyone assembling such a kit would have to build multiple copies of the car and go through the certification process individually.
And of course there are very few people that would want to assemble their own car, so you wouldn't be able to make a business out of it.
I've seen a few builds from scratch online. All of them say it turned out to be far FAR more difficult than they ever imagined. Once the thing works properly, it's up to what state/ country the builder is in to determine how hard or easy it is to get it legal to drive on the road.
I did a moped over a 3 day weekend. That was a lot of fun. The state required me to get a mechanic to sign off on it.
This exists in the motorcycle world, actually. You can buy a 2023 Suzuki DR650. It will have a speedometer, an air cooled 650cc single cylinder engine, and that's it. No ECU, no LED lights, no ABS, nothing. It doesn't even have fuel injection.
In the automotove world there is/was something sort of close to what you're describing. It's called a Mitsubishi Mirage. 3 cylinders making a furious 78 horsepower, gets great mileage, and is absurdly easy to maintain and repair. And ever since they started making the current Mirage in 2014, it has been given so much hate because it's a no-frills economy car. People literally bitch about how you can see a couple of screw heads when you open the door, and cry that it's slower than a Mustang and less luxurious than a Lexus.
So be prepared to hear that when designing a basic car. There are automotive writers and reviewers who are very out of touch, and can't understand that a basic cheap car is a good thing.
Oh absolutely, I'd expect this imaginary car would be an ugly thing, and constantly panned by reviewers. People would be outraged that some nobody burned hundreds of millions in lottery money on a trash looking car. Meanwhile, every mechanic constantly recommends it for a daily driver because it just works and is super easy to fix.
Interesting about the Mirage. Next time I'm looking for a commuter car, I'll have to look for one of those.
I would also join this endeavor. This country needs a small, light pickup truck again that a guy can fix in his driveway with basic tools.
Yes! Something the size of a 90s ranger, or even a little smaller. Built with flat glass and a bench seat if we can get away with it.
YES, YOU GET IT
Surely the volume knob isn't a real gear stick, right?
2019 Ford Edge
but... it gets worse!
2023 GMC Terrain
That automatic transmission control is really dreamed up by someone utterly deranged.
It's the freemasons
You think that's bad?
May I present the manual transmission on the Ford Edsel:
Yes. Those are transmission buttons on the steering wheel. There's also only two of them when you're actually driving that matter so it might as well be automatic.
is there an airbag?
No.
Ford has some terrible ones. I present the 2019 Lincoln Continental.
They put the radio controls down with the HVAC so they could put the gear selector and parking crap on both sides of the radio.
The eject button is for the cd player. It’s a single slot that loads inside the center console area under the HVAC controls that is open in that pic. Super inconvenient.
That is genuinely awful.
Oh damn I wasn't expecting to see a 2023 car with an AUX port
Range Rovers, unfortunate cars that they are.
Correct; it's not a stick, as it is a knob.
I've driven multiple vehicles with gear selection knobs.
It is.
hey i made this :) nice
You made this?
I made this https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/7313361f-9bb2-4f55-8510-a5ef85eab693.webp
hahaha
Manuals are for reading not for driving.
I appreciate the Standard you have set
Oh you mean the prndl?
I remember that from Momma's Family! Momma was trying to learn how to drive and asked, "What's a PRNDL?"
Here's a thought, get a car made in the same decade. Your experience on budget automatic from 2001 doesn't represent modern cars.
Our car is an automatic which is pretty recent and it's great.
newer cars are hard to find without proprietry spyware
I don't have a problem with convenience features, but the laws that allow manufacturers to spy on me can fuck off
Fuck if I dont miss bump-starting my old ford falcon.
I'm still perplexed by my grandfather driving around in a manual with a beer and a cigarette. Did the WWII generation have a third hand?
Millenial with a manual: you can pull off incredible feats while driving a stick with the right combination of knees and bad decisions.
I don't know how many studies have been done on this, but I have a conspiracy theory that it's a tradeoff for becoming more analytical and STEM minded basically. The number of STEM jobs have exploded in the millennial and gen-z generations, especially in the West where most of this stereotype seems to be concentrated in, which deal more with abstract thinking and memorisation as opposed to working with your hands and very high motor coordination, as is required in things like manufacturing or agriculture. We just don't train our muscle memory as much anymore due to a higher likelihood of not really having to anymore. (Which I guess also implies the inverse of the stereotype of boomers "being stupid" and prone to not thinking of the long term consequences of things being due to a much higher proportion of them working more labour focused jobs where analytical thinking is less important so they could just forget all the things they learned in school. I mean it's surprisingly common too see boomers thinking stuff like "windmills cause cancer" or "vaccines cause autism.")
I also firmly believe that you can get better at both analytical thinking and working with your hands if you make an effort to practice (don't practice by driving distracted though). The brain is highly adaptable regardless of your age or upbringing.
The chauffeur is supposed to be the one dealing with those mechanical details.
Finally someone gets it
I switched from manual to auto after I moved to Reading and found myself constantly dancing the clutch fandango in all the stop start traffic.
When driving an auto I have to be real careful not to try and hit the 'clutch'. Brake checked myself more than once doing that.
Does this guy not know of a handbrake?
Works really well in my automatic car.
Most of not-North-America drive around in manual vehicles. Have to wonder what the allure is of something which is kind of mundane and boring. When I'm driving a manual I'm not thinking I'm Steve McQueen, instead I'm just constantly shifting gears between sets of traffic lights. If people really want to connect with a car, then buy an EV. Instant torque and responsiveness without screwing around with extra sticks and pedals or suffering the rubber banding in some automatics.
It depends on what sort of experience you want, what roads you drive, whether it's mostly country or city, do track running etc.
I like manual more for various reasons. I don't do much city driving nor do I get stock in heavy traffic ques. I drive country roads and highways and do a few track days. With a manual I get a much more satisfying experience, as it requires more skill to make fast and/or smooth shifts. The tactile feel of the manual gear shifter makes me feel more connected to my car. Flappy pads shifting automatic doesn't require the same skill nor has the same tactile feel. It's awesome for city and ques though.
I don't think we have the same idea of what it means to be connected with the car. Most EVs aren't seeking to have you drive them, they are seeking to drive you, imho (except maybe the Hyundai N range thats coming, but only because it tries to manic cars).
I don't see the appeal of manuals. I just want to get from point A to point B, I don't want to have to think about it anymore than necessary. Driving to me is a chore and a hazard.
This meme is pre-electric.
Hyundai is making an Ioniq 5 N, that can simulate gears and gearchanges so people can still feel like vroooom, vroooooom. You can't make that up.
That's slightly less offensive IMO, than the fact that if you turned the speaker off on a modern ICE Mustang or Corvette, they'd be as quiet as a Prius. This means they could have put the speaker on the EV versions they just released, but they didn't. There's something wrong about a silent Mustang or Corvette.
As a resident in a nice, hilly area: Not really. Traffic can't become silent quickly enough.
Toyota is working on a fake manual too. As a manual enthusiast… I think it’s just dumb.
🚲💪
Someone bring this sniveling fool to me! I grew up on a farm and when I learned to drive, I started with a 5x3 manual double stick and then "graduated" to a 15 speed. I will have this fool crying in his pablum within a mile.
I'm all for automatics. What transmission you drive does not lessen the driving experience.
Maybe I'm kidding myself but I feel like even if I won the lottery I still wouldn't replace my -07 Nissan Pickup. I'd probably have the thing entirely rebuilt but it's basically my dream car as it is so other than customizing it even more there's nothing newer trucks have that I wish mine did too. The only downside to older vehicles is the increased need for maintenance though I'm much rather fixing a 15 year old truck today than 2023 truck in 2038.
04 Nissan Frontier over here. I specifically bought it because it has a manual transmission which is hard to find in the US. I drove all the way up to Seattle from Portland to get it. There are maintenance issues given its age, but I still love it. Apart from the bullshit bells and whistles, it's still every bit as capable as any new pickup in its class. I've doctored it up a bit over the years, so it's not fully stock anymore.
Yeah I ignored all the automatics aswell. Mine has a 6 speed manual, 4x4, low range and a rear diff lock.
They're called Navara here in Europe. I'm not sure how different it's from Frontier except that it has a 2.5 litre turbo diesel rather than petrol engine. I think it's a damn nice looking truck despite its age and with modifications it can be made to look even better. Mine is all murdered out.
Nice! Mine is a 3.2 liter V6 6 speed manual but w/o the turbo. It has a shitload of torque in 1st and 2nd, but isn't very fast or powerful once it's in third, 4th or 5th gear, which is fine with me.
It also has an extended bed and a canopy with flip-up windows on the sides. I've installed a roof-rack and have lifted the truck 2 inches together with aftermarket shocks and a new set of leaf springs. I've also installed "bullhorns" on the front together with "brush racks" to protect my old headlights.
All in all she's a pretty mean truck. I've taken her out with friends who are hardcore Jeep aficionados, and she's more than acquitted herself.
I've owned 3 automatics in 30 years. I'm going to ride out the apocalypse in my 2-seat 50+ year old, 35mpg manual.
35mpg is like 13l/100km. thats like really bad?
Edit: Lol its more like 9l/100km, still not great tho
Sadly, that's actually on the higher end of the spectrum when it comes to American vehicles
No wonder with all the trucks and SUV
1 gallon is about 3.8 liters. 1 mile is about 1.6km.
35 mi/gal = (35 * 1.6km)/gal = (35 * 1.6km)/3.8l
You want liters per kilometer tho, so reciprocal: 3.8l/(1.6km * 35)
To drive 100 km, you need 100 times the fuel => (3.8l*100)/(1.6km * 35) ~ 6.8 l/100km
I'm getting 6.7l/100 km using Google. Not sure what math you're doing. But keep in mind there are two different gallons, US and Imperial or something. 35 mpg is pretty normal for a gasoline-only car these days (hybrids can do better depending on driving conditions - if they can spend most of their time on battery, for example). Diesel cars aren't much of a thing in the US, again, especially after the whole Volkswagen cheating thing.
I know there used to be diesel cars in the 80s that would get crazy numbers like 50 mpg (4.7l/100km), and gas-powered cars probably could now, too, but emissions and safety requirements have pretty much killed that.
I really shouldn't do math in my head...
I looked up the 9ish, but not sure what calculator that was. I do get to 6.7 now too, so that is really not that bad.
I was starting to wonder what kind of cars you guys have that get such incredible fuel economy. :)
Yeah, but it's 50 years old. 12 was the average, and you really didn't see anything getting better that 25. That's on older roads with leaded gas and bias tires.
Love my 7MT and the risk of a high speed 1-2-1.
I don't drive a car that needs detonating dino-dhiarrea anymore. And BEVs only habe one gear. So there's that.
You drive a car that indirectly needs dino-dhiarrea. Only moved the problem one step.
Nope. I pay a bit extra for electricity from renewables. You could argue that the stuff that comes out of the socket still is the energy-mix that is produced at the time, but my invoice says something along the lines of "x kWh of electricity generated from renewable sources" and x kWh of electricity from renewable sources will have been fed into the grid over the time frame covered by my invoice. Good enough for me.
I could argue which energy source has been used to produce those panels and the battery, extract the materials, etc.
Not really. Do you need energy to produce those things? Yes. But how much dino-energy can be saved during the livetime of those products? Way more!
Batteries that need to be disposed of and replaced...this is not a solution.
Baby electric vehicles
I love dino diarrhea, that's my kink
handbrake starts are useless if you live literally anywhere with significant hills/slopes and traffic lol
You gotta learn to just give the proper gas to clutch ratio, otherwise you'll be holding up traffic anytime you want to move forward
Of course you have to have the proper gas to clutch ratio, Unless you mean just never using the brake. If it's steep enough, your foot still has to move from the brake to the gas. If the hill is steep, and the person behind you is riding your ass, you may very well roll back enough to hit them in the time it takes to move your foot from brake to gas. Which is why you'd need to use the hand brake to give yourself the time to move your foot to gas, then get the right ratio, and release the hand brake.
Was gonna explain, but SugarSnack already said it.
You hold the clutch at the bite point before you even reach the gas.
It takes practice, but even on the steeper hills it works fine. It all happens in under a second and you're off.
Cars that auto throttle with clutch make this even easier to do because you don't have to worry about stalling either.
In the UK you do hill starts as a part of the driving test. They're not useless because if you don't know how to do it, then you're going to roll back or cut out when you start off and that's a fail. Plenty of places have roads and hills. Hence why they're part of the test. Typically, you apply the parking brake, release the clutch enough to "bite" and hold you in place, release the brake and continue to release the clutch as you press on the accelerator. All in a controlled fashion.
Of course, fancier cars have hill start assist and electronic parking brakes these days so I don't know what happens if you show up for your test in one of those - they probably just do the test anyway because I'm sure people still manage to screw up.
The right most picture is a manumatic with lightning links and iirc you can push start on them.
Correct.
https://www.drivingline.com/articles/the-hurst-lightning-rods-shifter-system-was-the-craziest-80s-transmission-tech-ever-built/
My car doesn't even have gears.
I don't even have a car
Car what car what is a car ah a horse carriage you mean
What is a what now hello
I LIKE MY CARS LIKE MY MEAT
RAAAAAW
My favorite car ever was my 1986 Toyota Corolla manual. It was my mom's first and then I inherited it in the late 90s. The tire rod snapped one day and it slammed into a parked car. I was more devastated about losing the car than I was what it would cost me in damages.
I drive an automatic now. A Prius. I don't regret it because it's a really good car and was a really good investment in terms of savings on gas, but I do miss that Corolla and I really miss the feeling of control I had when I drove a manual.
I love this meme... Where can I find a collection?
Love my automatic!
I had a Datsun 280zx that I roll started for about a year before it rolled as far down the hill as it would go one time without starting. The car is still sitting at that spot 20-something years later.
I love my manual xB.