Just get an auto with paddle shifters, best of both worlds without having to feel like you’re operating Victorian era machinery. Modern auto boxes change faster than you can, and give better acceleration and economy.
I love driving and passed my test in a manual. I wouldn’t go back now.
My father in law decided randomly one day I was going to learn to drive manual. So he started up the pickup truck, and said “it’s easy to get started going down hill” as he demonstrated rolling down a steep hill. Then he u-turned, parked the truck at the bottom of that steep hill, turned off the engine got out and said “your turn”. Dick.
Lol volkswagen autostart
Slows down for speed bump.
Engine turns off.
Autostart and lane assist are turned off in my car.
🤮 So glad my stop-start has been broken on my Hyundai for years now, everything else works though
My ex tried to teach me to drive stick on the way home from urgent care… my urgent care. Because it was convenient for him at that time. He refused to teach me several times before then because it was inconvenient. (why yes, I did leave him decades ago over abuse, thanks for asking! Tho it was not the specific thing)
I don’t care if manual is superior in some irrelevant way; I refuse to learn now due to trauma. Pretty sure I looked just like this picture.
Different technology, different pros/cons. You don’t need to learn it in the same way you don’t need to learn to calculate the sheer force of a raindrop on a window: you just don’t need to.
Learning manual is one of those things that requires some understanding of what’s going on, a lot of time, and patience. It’s a feel thing, but you need context. After that, it’s muscle memory - and context.
Honestly, most people do all parts of it wrong. So don’t feel bad.
Meh, stick is simpler so if anything goes wrong it’s easy to fix or less things to break. The only other reason is that it forces you to pay attention to your driving, so, if your into cars, it’s more enjoyable to go for a drive.
Automatic is superior, especially now. You aren’t missing much.
Thing is, it’s not superior in any way, quite the opposite. Maybe things were different decades ago.
I enjoy driving, so I drive a manual. People who don’t enjoy driving, or who merely drive because there’s no other alternative, should not drive a manual.
That being said, nobody should drive a tesla.
I feel like learning manual is easy if you already know how to drive. My newest car is a stick shift and I just started driving it. Took like a month to be comfortable, but I was able to drive it and get from point a to point b without being good at it. Really just first gear that’s annoying.
Press the clutch with your left foot, slowly release it as you slowly press the accelerator with your right foot.
To be fair it is more complicated than that. You have to feel the car start to move, hear the revs react, adjust the rate at which you release the clutch and how much gas you give accordingly and for some vehicles/situations you even need to pause the release of the clutch for a moment to let the vehicle start to gain speed. It’s all something you eventually get used to and can do without thinking but there is a significant frustrating hump to get over in the learning curve.
I feel like those who say they don’t understand why people like driving manual are people who never got over that hump. Because once you get over it, it is a lot of fun. And even if you still prefer to drive automatic after that because of your personal preferences, you still get why some do like it.
I’ve taught a half dozen or so people to drive manuals. Each one did something I’d not have expected. My favorite was the person who pushed the clutch down only as far as they pressed the brake when coming to a stop. Of course the car died. Once we could break that habit they did alright.
I pretty much just start with having them stall the car to prove the world doesn’t end…it’s fine. It’s gonna happen a dozen or so more times. Let’s move on.
On the other hand, I grew up driving manual, as most people in Europe, and my first time driving an automatic I was rolling up to the car rental exit and I pressed the brake as hard as I usually press the clutch. It was not fun for anyone in the car.
Then over the next few days of road trip, everyone else in the car had their turn at driving and we all did it 2 or 3 times, so it became an inside joke.
You typically learn to feel the accelerator and brake with one foot but just engage the clutch (ie, all the finesse is letting the clutch out). But you know this. All your muscle memory works like that. When you switch to automatic, just use the one foot and it works much better.
You have probably already worked that out but it’s handy advice if you’re a passenger in an automatic with a first-time driver who is used to manual.
Heard the manual vs automatic argument million times. I learned to drive using manual, my first few cars were all manuals and this is all I knew for a long time.
When we bought our first car together with my wife we got an automatic. She is a less confident driver, and wanted an automatic car. I dont mind it at all, got used to it and now I don’t miss manual at all. She is a much safer driver, under stress or in a sticky situation the manual transmission is a an extra thing to worry about and I feel calmer knowing that she can fully concentrate on the road instead of shifting.
I think manual is great for experienced drivers, but automatic is so much safer for beginners and people like my wife.
i had a manual mustang cobra a long time ago and dealing with the clutch in stop and go traffic could get exhausting. my leg would actually start getting tired after a while.
I also learned on manual in Europe and switched to automatic when I moved to the US because it’s the only option.
i like driving while being able to rest one arm out the window, or sip from a drink or something.
If I need to quickly accelerate out of a busy turning I put it into Sport mode and turn Eco Mode off
“Press the clutch, release it slowly and accelerate.” Bus enginge turns off
“Lead with the foot that is going down” is missing from this.
I always hated this instruction. When instead I had it explained that one can think of it as fading the clutch out and fading the accelerator in (and that points in between are fine too) I immediately understood and never had an issue again. Admittedly I stalled a few times when switching to a different car whilst I learned its specific tolerances, but conceptually I was golden.
…now I drive an electric car.
Also it’s never taught that you should lift the clutch to the bite point and keep it still until the car builds up some momentum. I think people do it so subconsciously that it doesn’t occur to them that that’s the key to moving from a standstill.
I love teaching my friends how to drive stick. The first lesson is how to make the idle car move by lifting the clutch foot so slow that you can feel the car move and keep going slowly until the foot is off the clutch pedal. It’s about a 15 minute lesson and the driver understands what to do with the clutch. The gas is easy.
In their own car right? That’ll kill the clutch after a few friends. It’s entirely possible to do, but thats hella unhealthy wear on the clutch. The parking lot must just reek when you’re done.
It depends on the car, my first car used gasoline, so the idle torque was low and you really needed to push the gas at the same time, otherwise it would stall, maybe not if you are releasing the clutch extremely slow, but that is not practical.
My current diesel car has so much torque even at idle that you really don’t need to press the gas pedal while releasing the clutch.
It’s slow, but in most cars the idle is torquey enough that it’s not that slow. My beater doesn’t even have 1st gear anymore, so I start in second, and I can still go from a full stop to clutch fully released and rolling in like 4 seconds (if that) without touching the gas at all.
I feel like this is something that you just have to do to learn though. You can’t smoothly and competently operate the clutch without understanding the bite-point, and for a noob it’s going to be really tough to get a feel for that bite-point if they aren’t taking it very slow at first. Speed will come, usually after only a few starts
It’s also nicer to pedestrians and other drivers if the car isn’t sporadically revving or lurching.
Exactly! In city driving or parking lots when I’m just creeping around I literally don’t touch the gas at all sometimes
Nope. I teach them in my car. And yeah, the car might sometimes stutter but that doesn’t hurt anything. It’s hard to harm to a clutch without using the gas pedal or a graded street.
You aren’t having them redline the engine and slip the clutch going up a hill. Practicing idle starts in first is probably way less wear than a single sporty start on a highway on ramp.
On principle I only teach in their car, but made an exception for my friend’s husband since he wanted to rent a manual overseas. I learned my lesson, he didn’t
This wasn’t taught to me either but this is the best thing for teaching others. I’ve explained this to a few people before that were struggling to learn and it made the process much easier.
It’s like learning to ride a bike. There’s all this balance going on, but after you’re good at it it’s just natural and you kind of forget how to explain what to do because you stopped thinking about it so long ago.
I was taught that. I learned driving in Germany, though.
Really depends on the amount of torque your car has at idle, in some you don’t need to touch the gas pedal at all to set off.
Or how good the anti-stall system is, the car I learned in was basically impossible to stall by letting the clutch up too fast, it would just automatically fade in power.
To anyone wondering why some people prefer the control a stick offers over automatic, I tell them: it’s like listening to Beethovens 5th over the radio vs ACTUALLY CONDUCTING the orchestra.
As someone who’s never conducted an orchestra or driven a manual, this simile doesn’t really help at all.
In an automatic the car decides when to shift gears and to which gear. And it also decides how softly or hard it should do this.
In a manual car you have to do all of this yourself, but that also means you decide when and how to do it.
It’s raining out and the road your on starts going up a hill. Theres a lot of water on the road so you’re not driving fast. An automatic sees your rpms dropping because you need more power to go up the hill. It doesn’t know its raining. It downshifts to give you more power to get up the hill. You went from 50 mph at 1300rpms to 45 mph at 5000 rpms. All that power now going to your tires creates more opportunity for your wheels to loose traction in the rain and fishtail.
In a manual you put in a gear that keeps your rpms high enough to maintain speed but not 5000 rpms to “go faster”. The power to the wheels stays exactly where you want it to be based on the road conditions. Replace with snow, sleet, etc etc.
Wat? Its not 1995 anymore. The computers are smart enough not to send your rpms to the moon when you arent pressing the gas. And the system may not necessarily know its raining, but it sure as hell knows more about the moment to moment traction on each wheel than even the driver does! And lets not even get into the fact that you don’t make more power that way anyway, or that your tires are hopefully not so shit or bald as fuck and at risk of fishtailing during totally normal situations.
As someone who drives a manual, I’m going to go try and conduct an orchestra
Its like being a meteor instead of a satellite orbiting the earth
Every car I owned so far was a manual and only rentals were sometimes automatic. But that’s purely due to cost. I dive out of necessity, not for fun and an automatic is so much more relaxing in stop-and-go rush hour traffic than a manual stick shift.
Or do as the little old lady next to me in a car park yesterday: push the accelerator until the little needle is at 6000 (because you need to get up at 6), put the car in reverse and slowly adjust your speed with the clutch.
Either Honda accords have a pretty good clutch, or she was on her 9th by the look of the car.
Update: it went something like this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VCNzvKvIRhk it’s in Danish, but I think it’s pretty self explanatory
When I taught my brother and sis, after they got frustrated not finding the balance or the car dieing, I just told them to give it some real gas. If they’re apprehensive about it. I told them to just floor it in neutral to show nothing is gonna happen to the motor and it just hits the limiter. So after 30 minutes of them just focusing on slowly releasing the clutch while revving high, they had it down. Another 15 minutes and they were going up to 2k rpm while working the clutch.
Yes, I had to replace the clutch after teaching them both. Small price to pay for them now being able to drive anything.
That’s how learned basically, we have a lot of free way exits that leave you going uphill at a red light so that’s how I kept from rolling back into the car sniffing my exhaust
laughs in electric drivetrain
Voltage up.
Voltage down.
Simple. No additional headache.
3 phase synchronous motors want a word with you!
My parents insisted I learn on a manual, and while I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I do now.
The regional DMV office where I took my driving exam had the most notorious parallel parking setup in the state. It was two traffic cones next to a very large, 3 1/2 foot diameter log (representing the curb) and was on the side of a circular cul-de-sac. So not only did you have to account for the curvature, if you got too close to the “curb”, you were gonna have a very bad day lol.
If you’re wondering: I nailed it (they let you practice after hours which helped).
What does manual transmission have to do with parallel parking?
Nothing other than increasing the difficulty for a novice driver. Mostly it’s me going on a tangent and reminiscing about defeating that fucking log lol.
From my experience it’s a lot easier to drive slowly just woth the clutch instead of the gas pedam
Absolutely. Clutch control is super useful.
What’s wrong with just driving through the nearby streets and searching for a fitting spot for parking?
If you don’t have control over the finer movements of your car, parallel park is a pretty good way to weed it out. And if they don’t, you’re gonna fuck up harder in a place that actually matters.
Fuck up when it doesn’t matter so you don’t fuck up when it matters.
AFAIK, it’s mostly due to how the driving exams are structured.
First you have to pass the written exam. If you fail that, you don’t continue.
After the written exam is the parallel parking test. That’s done on-site. If you don’t pass that part, you don’t continue to the road test.
The road test is last; it’s up to the instructor where you go for that, but it usually is a route that covers various scenarios that were on the exam (4-way stops, crosswalks, speed transition zones, school zones, etc).
I’d guess it’s setup that way because of how many people fail the parallel parking test; best to do that in a controlled environment where there’s no risk to regular people’s cars out in the wild.
Edit: This probably varies state-by-state, too. I’m just describing how it was here.
Just get an automatic transmission instead. That might be my American perspective showing though. I know manual transmissions are more common in Europe (or at least I’ve heard), but I don’t know if that’s just driver preference or for some other reason (like cost).
Automatics had a bit of a bad reputation, for quite a while. They don’t/didn’t play well with our road layouts. E.g. they could be slow to downshift when climbing a hill, and kick when they did decide to play along. I believe they have improved a lot, but most people are used to manuals, and so more manuals are sold. This makes automatics more expensive and rarer.
I will say when I rented a car in Wales in the mid 2010s they had like literally 2 automatics and they were double the rate. It wasn’t at all common there then.
In France they’re only starting to get traction. They just weren’t a thing until say ten or fifteen years ago. Top of the line cars had the option, but it was very rare. It’s a matter of culture. We have an automatic now (wife is more comfortable with it), it handles gear changes shittily but it appeases my left leg, so we’re even.
