I will give up my manual transmission, if you will bring back pull-knobs, twist knobs and other tactile switches for the main controls of my vehicle, with the appropriate tactile feedback at set points so I can set them without looking.
After thinking on it, I am going to raise my demands, however: you also need to produce cars that are as visually appealing and reasonably sized as in the 50s and 60s. Fire all your designers, go back to whatever your models were in 1965, and begin anew. When in doubt, don't.
A great number of the cool designs from the 50's and 60's are illegal because the front of the car eats people. Swallows them, chews them up, and spits them out.
The sloped design of new cars isn't just about aerodynamics. In a low-speed impact a pedestrian is lifted onto the hood. Forward leaning grills, such as on the Dodge Charger, some of the beefier Mustangs, and any number of other muscle cars or sedans, instead clip pedestrians in the knee or hip, tip them over and drop them onto the ground, where the car then runs over them.
I think there was also an issue with those profiles and Jersey barriers, in that they were more likely to pole vault over them off the side of a bridge or onto - not into - oncoming traffic.
I understand, but a modern pickup truck comfortably seats 6 in its King Cab (and good luck finding a truck without a King Cab) and has a bed that is useless for carrying anything except maybe your gym bag or a dozen cases of empties. There is no doubt the purpose of a modern pickup truck is as a passenger vehicle and secondarily to provide an advertising medium for you political beliefs.
The fact that modern American passenger vehicles have evolved into statistically significant deathtraps for surrounding pedestrians, cyclist, and even smaller cars is as political as anything else in that country these days.
What's missing is that those "worksite" trucks should require a special commercial drivers license and extra testing for the professional drivers who drive them, same as big rigs. And not be allowed for non-work trips like driving to school.
This is a really good idea that I have not heard before.
It can also be introduced with new vehicle registrations so as not to bring out the pitchforks. Anyone with a truck can keep going, but next purchase, they need to do a driving test.
I can't imagine parents paying for their kids to do the extra course if it costs them a fraction of that for their kid to drive a regular sedan.
You need to do a pilot study to see if accidents can be reduced. This could be done in a Western town that has tens of miles from it to anywhere else, so you are only putting a few thousand people through the course.
This could be financially incentivised, so people get paid to do the course. If the results are good then you could make it so that people buying a truck or wanting to drive one get $500 off if they have done the course, with insurers in on it so that it just becomes easier to do the course. No freedom to be American need be jeopardised.
I think what you are asking is to lower the existing legal thresholds. Today if a vehicle's GVWR/GCWR or axle count exceeds a specific number varies by state then a different endorsement is required on the drivers license. [1] Each state may have additional requirements and some have additional endorsements and classes of vehicle.
Your comment is dripping with more political vitriol than I've seen in "that country" in a while
You can find plenty of more compact pickups - I've been searching for the best one for a while because the Dodge Ram and Ford F150 are just too big.
The Honda Ridgeline, the Ford Maverick, the Chevrolet Colorado, the Hyundai Santa Cruz, the Toyota Tacoma, are all more compact, only seat 2-4 people, and have more bed than cab.
The problem is not supply, it's demand. Every american wants to be the biggest vehicle on the road, and can't stand the mild inconvenience of sitting in a car, so their vehicle must be as large, spacious, comfortable, and luxurious as an expensive couch.
Toyota could bring back the tiny 90s tundra, and they would sell a tiny tiny number of them. That's why the modern corolla is as large as the 2000s camry.
Indeed, it should be the actual use that governs this. If you use it as a passenger vehicle, it's a passenger vehicle. If you use it on a farm then it's a farm vehicle.
There's already special registration for farm vehicles in a lot of states. The taxes are lower and that's one of the few cases where you can use pink diesel, which is also taxed differently.
Trucks used as passenger vehicles are already more expensive to register and run than farm vehicles.
Exactly. The technocrats thought they'd be clever, and they basically outlawed reasonably sized cars for very small marginal efficiency gains. People bought light truck instead. People don't want to drive around in dinky death traps.
The CAFE standards for cars are too restrictive. The fleet averages look great, but the percentage of cars as vehicles on the road is low. Cars such as station wagons don't exist any more - the only option is to go larger and get an SUV.
The current crop of technocrats thinks that regulation is like violence. If you don't get the result you want, then add more regulation. Still don't get the result you want, add more regulation. They never think about offering compelling products that people want to buy at a decent price point.
I don't understand this comment. SUVs are classified as passenger vehicles. They're also getting larger (and more dangerous for pedestrians), but to nowhere near the same degree that pickup trucks have.
The danger posed by pickup trucks is chiefly a function of the absence of regulation: the US has decided that you can role-play as a farmer and get treated as one for safety purposes, without actually demonstrating a need for a car that's patently unsafe for US streets and highways.
It's complicated because the SUV label is arbitrarily used by manufacturers and consumers, but many/most SUVs are classified as light trucks for safety and emissions purposes.
My bad -- I thought that SUVs and "crossovers" were the same type of car, but the former is (apparently) typically the same platform as a light truck, while the latter is more typically a compact car or station wagon platform.
I'm not saying that we ought to restrict truck sales based on need -- I'd be perfectly happy restricting them to county roads only and requiring additional licensing and/or certification (similar to a CDL).
But since you asked: just about anything that can be turned into an explosive. Or, you know, prescription medicine.
> The technocrats thought they'd be clever, and they basically outlawed reasonably sized cars for very small marginal efficiency gains. People bought light truck instead. People don't want to drive around in dinky death traps
I thought this comment was saying the opposite of what you meant at first. There are no small cars anymore, even the "Mini" is gigantic. And modern cars are safer than ever, due to smarter design and better engineered materials.
None of your cited conspiracy really shakes out with reality. Station wagons are still being made but most Americans just don’t want them. There’s a stigma in the US against station wagons (Doug Demuro style enthusiasts notwithstanding,) similar to that against minivans, and this has resulted in less US wagons for decades. In some cases they’ve been rebranded as SUVs (eg Subaru Outback.)
There already were a few before, but now Dodge must have done something "right" because there really are many RAMs around. Those things are so ridiculous for Paris, that I'm pretty sure they don't even fit through some streets.
Hell, my father used to have a fairly common French sedan that would sometimes need a lot of maneuvering through the public garage ramps, and would barely fit in the parking slots.
In NL, a RAM can be bought as a company car, effectively dodging road tax. (50 euro vs 200 euro per month). For comparison, you pay 100 euro per month for a tiny car if it runs on diesel (these were 'green' and exempt from road tax 10 years ago). Or between 30 and 70 per month for gasoline cars.
We have the best or second best roads in the world (which is very noticeable when you drive into neighboring countries). Additionally we have extremely low congestion even at rush hour.
Road tax depends heavily on the vehicle. I think we pay ~€1000 a year, ~€83 a month, for our Hyundai ix35.
* Diesel is mostly front loaded in the yearly road tax. With a very low tax on fuel. So if you drive a lot it is worth getting a Diesel for this reason alone.
* Petrol has a lighter yearly tax. There is a formula someplace and it has to do with engine size, weight, age and some other things assuming I understood correctly. The yearly tax is cheaper on average than the diesel. Then there is a large tax on petrol. About €0.17 a liter or €0.642 a gallon.
Sometimes over 200.. And then we pay super high excise (lowered until the end of the year) and tax over fuel. Basically we pay about half on taxes over fuel. To finance that, you pay with money your earned and payed 50% income tax. So basically the gov takes 75ct out of your euro, and we still can't manage treasury
And this is a problem because why? It's pretty perfect for the role of "something a little lesser than a small dump truck but that still does the same jobs".
A "company car", usually means a van. Something with no passengers except the front row, and it needs to have certain dimensions. The RAM is therefore classified as one of those. And because vans are meant for business, you pay less.
They're showing up more in Czech Republic too. It's hard to describe quite how ridiculous they look here, they dwarf all cars around them and stick out like a sore thumb. I imagine actually using them is a pain given how scarce parking can be in the city, where I often see them.
Same thing happened to SUVs. It's mostly "i want a bigger car than my neighbour" kind of thing , and now there are many more SUVs, driving in a sedan around them feels a bit intimidating, as you are worried they may not see you well enough on the road. It's a downward spiral. Now people want something even bigger on the outside and they go with pickup trucks.
I think lots of people assume that the Toyota Hilux / Ford Ranger type pickups are as big as American pickups. In reality the pickups sold for the UK/EU are modest compared to the US. Even an F150 is quite a bit bigger, nevermind when you get into the F350 etc.
I was in Paris, Normandy, and all over the south of France for two weeks and didn’t see a single pickup. I swear every car there is like a variation of the Ford Fiesta.
While the vehicles sold under same brands and names, the outside configuration is different.
For example, you can't attach animal guards here to pickup trucks, and you need extra reflectors and different lighting configuration in US for all cars.
While not directly related to safety standards, intelligent active matrix LED lighting systems are illegal in US, too.
Everything the other people said, but also weird things with center of body mass and the strike area. You don't want people pushed under the car. You also don't want them to go head first through the windshield, which I'm told is why the Mini Cooper got such a drastic redesign a few years ago - they needed a taller hood not to flip pedestrians.
The tall grill at least doesn't ram your head through the glass. I don't know who started calling them FUVs (Fuck U Vehicles) but they are not wrong.
It’s more than just about style. As much as modern pickup trucks have become a fashion statement, many large pickup trucks are providing real utility to construction, farming, etc.
And much like 18 wheelers they can’t scale down the front while maintaining utility because they need large engines and high ground clearance.
Disagree. Because the utility is seldom fully utilized in an urban environment, they are nearly pure fashion. They serve as a signaling mechanism the same way that a pair of Gucci loafers do, just for a different culture.
>Because the utility is seldom fully utilized in an urban environment, they are nearly pure fashion.
Utilization of private vehicles scales with income, not with population density. HN just all tends to live in "nice" places so they never see people using their vehicles to the max. This is true for all vehicle classes, not just pickup trucks.
Because a strong negative reaction is also a sign of fashion.
Tattoos aren’t universal, what’s acceptable for Army special forces, goths, gang members, etc are all different. So, good or bad only exists in a specific context it isn’t something that any person can judge universally. Someone really can define good as whatever pisses people like you off.
Some of us need the utility of a truck (hauling a trailer for camping, hauling gear bi-weekly to a racetrack, driving through poorly maintained roads during the winter).
Well no... that's my point! A political statement is not fashion. If one plants a political flag in their garden in support of a presidential candidate, that's not fashion, that's politics.
If people decide to broadcast their opinions about the world using cars, they certainly can; but I don't think that kind of behavior can be called "fashion". Ideology, maybe.
Political affiliation is definitely part of social standing and the degree to which such signaling impacts how people talk, dress, and what they buy is very much fashion.
Regionality in fashion is significant, clothing included, but in this part of the world trucks are definitely fashion. People largely drive trucks because they like the way they look in them, not because they have some secret political statement that nobody is picking up on.
As you venture out into the world you will also find trucks that are clear political statements. You might be right that an individual cannot own a truck for both fashion and political reasons (although I'm not sure I agree), but just because some people use trucks for political statements does not mean all trucks are political statements. Some trucks can be used for fashion without crossing those who use them political statements.
I think that's making too fine of a point. There are numerous aesthetic choices associated with political positions; variants of "military chic" amongst conservatives is one example.
I happen to think that most modern trucks look incredibly stupid, but that's because their design language isn't intended for me. It's intended for people who have different fashion tastes, tastes that approximate political positions that I don't hold. In other words: the truck itself isn't a direct political statement, ordinarily; it's an efficient means for signaling politics through fashion.
> It's intended for people who have different fashion tastes, tastes that approximate political positions that I don't hold.
As a Canadian living in the heart of supply management (i.e. state ownership of the means of production) country, where supplies are provided by the so named and literal Co-op (i.e. community ownership of the means of production), trucks are very popular. In part because they are useful tools in carrying out the business within that socialist system, but also because outsiders emulate to try and convey similar social standing.
If there is a political statement to be found in there, which may be a stretch, to me it would be that trucks = socialism. But when I look beyond my bubble, I'm left with the impression that trucks are, if anything, especially stateside, a statement at the compete opposite end of the spectrum.
What approximate political position do you believe is inbuilt into the design of modern trucks?
I would say crocs and pickup trucks are opposite. Many many people hate crocs and how they look but they are in many regards actually an extremely practical shoe for most peoples' day to day life. The opposite is true for trucks.
Does everyone here live in a studio apartment? Pickup trucks are the most utilitarian vehicle you can buy. Whether you use it for hauling furniture from the antique store, or you transport firewood or a load of topsoil or throw a kayak in the back, or one of a million other jobs. I don't get how people can become so radicalized that they develop a hatred for pickup trucks. We are doomed as a country
I’ve owned several pickups. My current pickup has two doors, a vinyl floor, roll up windows, a key to open the door, and dents all over it. That’s a utilitarian vehicle. The $60k luxury barges I see at the mall are not that.
Exactly when I see a pickup drive by that that is dented or scratched up and has a bunch of shit in the back... ya know is a vehicle that has been used for stuff a truck makes sense for and I think that is great. (These trucks are usually smaller trucks too like rangers and s10)
99% of trucks are not that these days and that may be being generous.
Also... spend half the money on a beater truck and the other half on a civic so you dont take up the whole damn road on your commute to your office job and kill me when your comically oversized vehicles rides over mine in a car crash. I am tired of seeing $70,000 trucks without a scratch on them being used like they are a commuter sedan, its selfish and stupid.
I'm probably missing your point, but I don't mean in the sense of them being a common type of footwear, I mean they were on runways, worn by celebrities, etc. https://www.whowhatwear.co.uk/crocs-shoes/slide4
Pickups are actually one of the worst vehicles imaginable in the snow. You have to throw a lot of weight in the rear to get traction, the wheelbase is long so that spinning out of control is far more likely and terrifying, trucks are super high off the ground so roll over risk is high (ESPECIALLY with lifted trucks) and worst of all extremely heavy vehicles like big trucks have a horrendous stopping distance in the snow which is by far and away the most important thing in the snow.
If you want a vehicle that will handle moderately deep snow the best a subaru station wagon is probably the ideal shape, or at low speeds a shorter jeep wrangler if you are actually going off road.
Even where I grew up in northern maine, where everyone had two trucks, 10 feet of snow per winter was reliably expected, and everyone runs a farm, very few people would plow their own driveway.
For personal driveways, people had cheap push snow blowers. For the roads, we had big plow trucks and literal construction equipment was used for large roads and parking lots.
Very few people plow, because plowing is harder than snow blowing, more damaging to your lawn and driveway than snowblowing, and just all around less effective. And the few people who do actively plow their own driveway will either start a business to do other people's driveways (a common way for 16 year olds to make money in the winter) or just straight up plow neighbors driveway for free or payment.
Even in this literal heaven for trucks, full of farmers, outdoor activities, mud, and construction, 8 out of 10 trucks were driveway queens.
Interesting, where I grew up both snow and trucks where significantly less common, but that meant infrastructure to deal with it was also more adhock.
Back then I would say around 1/3 to 1/4th of households in the area with large trucks had a snow plow, but I only knew one guy with a snowblower. Of course that also related to how long it took the state to deal with back roads after even a minor snow event.
Yah but even then, I suspect a 4x4 suv would be better suited than a pickup for that... its just people use absolute incredible shit tier beater trucks for plowing similar to how people use shit tier cars to deliver pizzas. I dont think its because a beater truck is better than say a 4x4 SUV, it just is (was?) easier to find a beater truck.
If somebody is using a nice truck to snow plow they are pissing away money. Ice, constant torquing stress on the frame, hitting shit hidden in the snow, salt on main roads everywhere (depending on place) etc... it is fastest way to reduce the value of a vehicle next to driving it into a brickwall or driving it off a bridge into the ocean.
I live next to a few people who keep their $80,000 truck immaculate, and will never touch an unpaved field with it. The best trucks for driving in snow and mud are the trucks that actual farm hands drive, and are usually far less decked out, have mismatched paint schemes, and are covered in scratches and dirt. Completely their choice to make that purchase, obviously, but I’ve seen worse vehicle choices.
However when my wife walks past one and the hood is over her head, knowing that this is possible because it’s exempt from regulation as a ”farm vehicle” seems like a corruption of government regulation.
I don’t think we need to make people prove how they will be using a vehicle, so maybe we should just require different license classes based on vehicle’s current weight and/or height? Driving a 7,000 lb truck that is 6.5’ tall is not the same as driving a passenger car.
A basic driving license will allow you to drive a 26,000lb GVWR box truck with an actual length of 34 feet. Is this the right call? It doesn't seem to be a problem, because very few people are buying such large trucks for daily drivers.
The talk about "farm vehicle" is a red herring in this whole thread. Actual farm plates are rare. The significant distinction is cosplayer vs contractor, which happens to be independent of commercial plates.
The right answer is probably charging yearly registration (/road use) fees based on GVWR. This is already common for trailers. There should be a part that scales as the road wear from weight does. I think it's something like the third or fourth power?
What's really scary are the RV exemptions in the majority of US states[0]. As that list notes in 34 states you can drive ANYTHING regardless of size or weight as long as it's classified as a "recreational vehicle".
I live in a rural area where pickup trucks are used for farm tasks, hunting (deer season, coyote season is every day), construction, towing, etc at a much higher rate than you probably see across the US in average.
Among the community of people that use their trucks for "real work" (whatever their definition of that may be) an immaculately kept truck like the one you're describing would be referred to as a "pavement princess".
Ok, but most trucks sold today are indeed pavement princesses. For every one you see in the country doing work, there's 5 others being parked on tenth/quarter-acre lots in the cities/suburbs.
My guess is it’s closer to 25%, once you consider people who use a snow plow, haul a boat/camper/trailer etc. Now sure many of these could be replaced with smaller trucks without extended cabs etc, but the choice of pickup truck was still useful.
Pickup trucks are horrendous for snowy conditions. You literally have to put extra material in them to make them manageable.
The farmers in my family do have pickup trucks. 40 year old ones with standard cabs and no frills.
There is virtually no good function for a modern leather appointed king cab other than signaling your group. Which is fine! Half of car ownership is that but do t pretend that even half of trucks are used for some truck like usage. Heck the half that are is for hauling boats or rvs once or twice a summer.
I don’t think that’s quite accurate. I live in an area where even people with tiny houses have a boat, and they don’t bring it out just once or twice in a summer. And once you need that pickup truck instead of a Prius, the King cab and leather is just a luxury upgrade like anything else. I see plenty of contractors, etc., around here with big shiny pickup trucks.
Let me guess, you've never heard of the term "Pavement princess".
Yes, farmers use pickup trucks, and they're great for that purpose. Nobody is arguing or disagreeing with you on that point.
Nobody is arguing against the purchasing of pickup trucks in the general sense. We're arguing against the purchase of a pickup truck as a daily driver. Something that will be used to commute and buy groceries.
Here in the frozen hellscape of maine, nearly all snow mangement is done by dedicated equipment. They use skidsteers, dump trucks, front end loaders with giant buckets or snow blowers, and what few trucks they do have don't plow, they spread dirt or salt, which the dump trucks also can do so they are only used to dirt/salt small parking lots.
Individuals buy push snow blowers or snow blower attachments to their lawn tractors.
Occasionally a business will contract someone with a plow on a truck but that's not common because the contractors who actually deal with this regularly have dedicated equipment that's better than a plow on a truck and using a shitty plow on a standard truck is actually not easy.
Even the parking lot in my private apartment complex is cleaned after a snow storm by a company with multiple front end loaders and skidsteers.
https://d3v9db8ug40up8.cloudfront.net/styles/large/s3/2020-0...
This is colloquially called Unimog (successor, kind of), a general purpose utility vehicle with awesome drivetrain, huge tires, great weight distribution, not too heavy, serves winter and summer in several roles.
Yet, many people also have pickup trucks in Norway specifically to deal with moving snow which is what I was referring to. You don’t need a high percentage of big trucks to do this, but it is utility you get from a truck you don’t get from a model 3.
Sure, regular sedans are no use for plowing private roads or parking lots. (Anything municipal gets plowed with larger trucks.)
As you say, you don't need very many pickups for that. The fraction of American pickups that are used for snow plowing is pretty much irrelevant to this conversation.
Don’t forget that the Census Bureau counts every town of 2,500 in the middle of farm country as an “urban area.” I’m in an “urban area” and I can drive to horse farms in 5 minutes.
And of course those horse farms only demand a big truck if you are doing big work on the horse farm. If all you need is AWD you don't need a big truck.
You asked why, and the answer is cost vs benefit. Car styling alone doesn’t justify the risk to pedestrians, large truck utility can. Yes, this tradeoff kills people, but so do all sorts of things like not physically preventing cars from driving 80+MPH.
This is a non answer. Australia has a vehicle style commonly referred to as a "ute"[1]. I think it stand for "utility". Which is basically a car with a truck bed in the back. This provides many of the advantages of a pickup without the increased danger to pedestrians. Why are car companies not marketing/selling these to the average consumer instead of the monster RAMs and F150s? I suspect the reason has everything to do with styling and little to do with utility.
edit: I suppose it's not unintended consequences. It's LBJ's corrupt decision to trade tariffs for votes / curry favor with unions that harms US consumers.
Chicken tax doesn't apply if you build it here. And Toyota builds some stuff here, so they could build trucks here. Or, just pay the tax, like Ford does for the Transit Express (although they did try tax dodging for several years).
A bigger problem is fuel efficiency standards that encourage larger footprints. You can't hit the mandated mpgs in a compact truck, so enlarge the truck to make it hit the standards.
The reason is because ANCAP and Euro NCAP test for pedestrian safety and US NCAP does not. They have been sitting on their hands since 2015. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-20-419
I agree that for the average consumer the a car chassis is fine. Unfortunately it’s not going to haul a large horse trailer over rough terrain and we don’t force a special permit for full sized trucks or have sufficient gas taxes to discourage them.
As to why Ford etc is targeting regular people with these monstrous trucks it’s both profitable and current regulations promote their sale. You can dig into the history of these regulations but as far as I can tell it’s a mix of trying to appease businesses and a specific voter demographic. Call it corruption or giving people what they want, it’s not going away anytime soon.
I would argue the minivan is the most comically underloved vehicle in the US given how perfectly it fulfills what people want from their vehicle. There is little reason to buy a ute style vehicle over a minivan in my opinion. I had to buy a used car last year (I have no kids, just a girlfriend and no plans in the near future for kids if ever.. lol who can afford that shit?) and used car prices were/are? absolutely insane. I widened my search to pretty much any car type and decided to look for a remote job/job with a very short commute so I wouldnt have to buy a gas efficient vehicle. I wanted basically a honda civic type vehicle but even old beat up honda civics with 250,000 miles driven by high schoolers were still far too expensive for what you were getting.
...then I realized that one of the vehicles taxi companies use are toyota siennas and read some articles about how minivans had actually barely gone up in price even though people were desperate for cars.
I got a 2006 awd sienna with nice newer tires, a 3500 pound towing package, roof racks, sunroof, power doors and hatch, disc brakes, an absolutely cavernous interior with removable seats that can fit a full size plywood sheet, window shades, a leather interior and the top trim level audio system with a newer android touchscreen radio unit for $6000. Yah it had 180,000 but on a sienna if it is maintained well that is nothing. I mean.. all the electrical shit still works on it somehow? Also this thing is fun to drive, it isnt a sports car by any means but steering is sensitive and accurate and the wheelbase is so long it eats bumps like a couch even though the suspension isnt floaty.
If I had bought a civic it would have had 250,000+ miles, cloth seats, shit tires, huge dents and probably a replacement panel that was a mismatched color along with innumerable random small problems.
Americans hate the idea of owning a minivan more than the idea of not owning a car and it is hilarious because minivans are what you get when you take a hard look at american life and design a large vehicle for it that ticks off every box. Unless you are towing very large things frequently ever other large vehicle is a joke compared to a minivan.
I mean.. sliding doors yo... I will never buy a large vehicle without them after owning one with them.
Minivans are extreme popular. You see rows of Odysseys and Siennas at soccer games and military housing. The bumper stickers are essential for finding ones own in the lot.
Mostly insecure rich people (or desperately wannabe rich), especially "overcompensating" macho-men and short-women, buy SUVs and shiny non-work big trucks.
In the USA we have sport-utes, which was the original term for SUVs. Don’t know why that was forgotten and replaced with MORE syllables, but there you go.
Now we have no small trucks, and a continued parade of bloated, impractical junk that manufacturers are pushing as “small.” The new Ford Ranger and Chevy Colorado stand out as regressions from their former incarnations, and the Maverick is another joke. They all force giant four-door cabs and puny beds on all buyers.
Thus they lack the usefulness of a proper truck, and the safety of the “utes” you describe.
the sloped design of... a current Escalade? I do doubt designers in the 50's were worried about the top of the grill hitting a full grown mans head on contact.
Those "forward leaning grills" you're crapping on are just flimsy plastic with a bunch of air behind them. If they strike a pedestrian at any speed they deform and crumple and whatnot and the pedestrian winds up on the hood.
While not styled to lean forward like what Dodge does pretty much all the tall bulbous front ends that HN hates and are found on modern cars and crossovers are designed like this. A bunch of plastic with air behind it is the primary means by which OEMs meet the European pedestrian safety requirements. The styled plastic provides something that's softer than the quasi-structural radiator core support that all the front end cosmetic stuff attaches to for the pedestrian to hit.
The context of my comments was someone asking about designing like the 1950's. I was trying to explain why we can't legally build those exact cars.
If you ignore that bit of the conversation, you're right that in a modern car you've got a good foot of material before you reach the first bit of metal, which is the hood, and the hood as some others have said is designed - today - to have a little give when a human encounters it. Something I actually have limited first hand experience in.
A lot of those muscle cars though, the hood of the vehicle extended all the way out past the bumper. So you wouldn't be able to build those exact designs. But maybe there's some compromise that incorporates your points with mine? The modern Mustang looks like an homage to the Mach era, but it's a shadow of that bad boy, and it only comes after decades of wandering in the proverbial desert.
The problem is always when you ask why generations of smart people didn't see the obvious answer, occasionally the answer is only visible to outsiders (curse of knowledge) but more often the answer simply doesn't work because of other, bigger concerns than aesthetics. For every time Beginner's Luck works out, there are tens or hundreds of cases of Chesterton's Fence.
Ahaha I was thinking of passengers. Hence "how do they get eaten?" But even so, were old car shapes really worse than modern car shapes? Seems like you get hit, you're gonna have a bad time no matter what.
There is a reason RR and Mercedes don't sell hood ornaments any more in certain markets as an example. They first crush your legs and then shread everything above. I imagine some of the 50s and 60s designs will be worse with sharp corners and pointy spikes.
Even for people in the car, some older car designs put the drivers legs under the engine block. In a head on collision at speed, the legs were the crumple zone (meanwhile the steering column was being pushed through your torso).
edit: also recently people noticed that high 'trucks' would simply miss the crumple zones in the car they were crashing into
> Another problem is "impact incompatibility" where the "hard points" of the ends of chassis rails of SUVs are higher than the "hard points" of cars, causing the SUV to "override" the engine compartment of the car.[18] In order to tackle this problem, more recent SUV/off-roaders incorporate structures below the front bumper designed to engage lower-height car crumple zones
"Even for people in the car, some older car designs put the drivers legs under the engine block. In a head on collision at speed, the legs were the crumple zone (meanwhile the steering column was being pushed through your torso)."
Anytime anyone waxes nostalgic about how "they dont make cars like they used" I think about this video. They sure as hell don't make cars like they used too, you can get out and walk away from a crash in your ugly newer car that would brutally end your life in one of those beautiful classic cars.
For anyone that is curious the key thing to pay attention to in survivability here (besides yah know... the airbag) is.. does the interior cab of the car change shape? The cab of the old car violently changes shape in a way that would destroy parts of your body whereas the newer car's cab doesnt seem to be affected at all. Even if getting crushed between the seats and dashboard didnt kill you immediately in the bel air, I struggle to imagine how emergency first responders would even get you out of that.
I agree with you, but crashing a 50-year old car also isn't the same as crashing a new car. Rust, failed fasteners, etc has to bias that crash to make it even worse for the old car.
"Rust, failed fasteners, etc has to bias that crash to make it even worse for the old car."
Did you see that bel air in the video? It is in beautiful condition as far as I can tell.
Besides, things like rust would make the car crumple more not less and the issue is that the car doesnt crumple enough (in the right spots) so I imagine rust in the frontend could actually make it safer ironically.
My understanding: Crumple zones only work in conjunction with hard points behind them. If the engine goes into your knees and the wheel into your chest, they weren't strong enough, or guided in safer directions. Crumple zones' primary job is to make the stop more gradual, to reduce G-forces and whiplash.
> edit: also recently people noticed that high 'trucks' would simply miss the crumple zones in the car they were crashing into
Yup. But because pickup truck drivers still want to sit 50 feet above traffic, the trucks end up with these ridiculously tall front ends and complain about how ridiculous they look. When you tell them it's so you don't run over other cars and kill the occupants in a crash, they literally tell you that they don't care.
This comment actually got a laugh out of me. I truly have no idea what would be feasible in a collision like this. Probably packing peanuts? Airbags on the outside of the car that deploy when a pedestrian is detected?
Pedestrian airbags have been designed before, but don't seem to have caught on widely [1].
A more bizarre solution Google patented always stuck with me: A sticky car hood beneath an eggshell coating so that a struck pedestrian would stay on top of the car instead of falling and hitting their head or being run over [2].
There are wearable airbags on the market for motorcycle use. I don't know how effective they are for their intended use or how effective they might be protecting a pedestrian, but it's a technology that exists.
Unfortunately you're being down voted, but the reality is there are crumple zones built into some hoods (bonnets) that help protect the pedestrian from immediately impacting the solid parts of the engine. So the concept isn't completely unexplored.
Airbags and seatbelt pre-tensioners have "explosives" in them (they convert very rapidly into gas, but I'm not sure all of them always meet the usual standards of explosives).
The defective Tanaka airbags used ammonium nitrate, of Oklahoma City Bombing and Beirut port fame.
They wanted to keep the profile of the car low which didn't allow for the space normally needed, so they provide it 'on demand' in case of impact. Unfortunately for a friend of mine who is an owner, that turned a fairly minor collision with an object into a several thousand pound repair as the system shears the bonnet mounts and deforms the bonnet.
Euro NCAP test suite features vulnerable road user protection tests [0] including for pedestrians and cyclists. The NHTSA might start recommending some limited technological additions for pedestrian protection in the future [1].
That's exactly what we do. All that mostly air filled plastic that is used to shape the bulbous front ends of modern front ends on cars and crossovers serves this purpose. If you ever look at a car and wonder why there's so much unused space between the grill and radiator that's why.
Can I add a request? A car that doesn't phone home. That is, one that the government is utterly unable to remotely turn off, monitor, or impose distance quotas. One that cannot be hacked through a poorly secured server in a car maker's server farm or government server with the username/pass admin/admin.
It's already started. My insurance State Farm has already advertised you can get a lower rate if you drive around with their dreadful phone application. Won't be long until it's mandated you drive with one or else you're stuck with an "unsafe driver" charge on your insurance.
That's already happening in the sense that companies are able to offer these discounts for their telematics-using customers by surcharging all their other customers. If you're not using one of these devices, you're already paying for it, even if it's not formally recorded as a fee.
exactly. I like how its the government thats always the boogieman despite Tesla and BMW already and clearly abusing thier ability to control a car remotely. Corporates have clear motivation to control you and squeese you.
That's because the consumer has the ability to choose (at least currently in the automotive market) a different manufacturer that won't control and squeeze them like Tesla or BMW would. If the big bad government is doing it instead, it means they are mandating the controlling and squeezing with the full might of the government behind it. Of course they're the boogieman.
I think that safeguard has already failed, the terms and conidtions allow manufacturer to introduce this functionality to millions of cars that are already on the road, years afterr they were bought
It seems like it should be straightforward to pull out any cell radios, no? I've removed them from cell phones with ease, and I have to think the larger size of a car would lend itself to this being easy.
The components communicate with a central module in the car, which then has an LTE modem. So you only need to disable one module, not every single component.
Why not the tires? New cars come with tire pressure sensors and tire pressure plays a big role in fuel efficiency as well as safety. It's just a few more bits of info.
Anything that has a remote chance of making more profit than the competitor will be attempted. Even if it's morally questionable... moral != legal. Heck, VW even threw legality out the window with emissions shenanigans a few years ago.
I'm not arguing that it's wrong or right... it's just the entrepreneur's duty to try and the consumer's obligation to keep things in check.
“Through RFID technology, Michelin makes tires that "communicate" by linking them to a more global ecosystem, to create infinite potential for innovations and added value for its customers.
Our goal: connecting all MICHELIN tires for Passenger Cars, Light Trucks, Heavy Trucks and Busses by 2024.”
and
“Permanently readable
- RFID used in tires is a passive technology that doesn’t require a battery
- Tire tag can be read even when the tire is moving or rolling”
and
“Secure
- Tag is locked after writing by the tire manufacturer
- Robust traceability technology against robbery and counterfeiting”
It wouldn’t surprise me if some governments tracked cars by their tires,
Cars are terrible platforms for anonymity. Car is registered, you're registered, hard to swap cars, you travel as a large, predictable discrete block down the road, etc.
You're making terrible assumptions here. The fact is you'll need special tools and then you'll need to follow a special procedure as if you're defusing a bomb. Otherwise... the radio will phone home and inform the mother-ship it's being tampered with.
The prima facie reason is that in case of an accident the car should be able to request help even if everyone inside the car is unconscious. The other reason is, of course, that document you signed at the dealership stated that you've only purchased the _right_to_use_ the car... not the actual car.
Have fun with your rental :-) You should have read the fine print.
> The other reason is, of course, that document you signed at the dealership stated that you've only purchased the _right_to_use_ the car... not the actual car.
I can assure you that (in the US at least) when you buy a car, pay off any financing, and ultimately hold the title free and clear, you do in fact own the car.
Right to repair advocates should be focusing on this too. Companies should have to provide a mechanism for disabling telemetry data (or some variation of this that I think we could discuss and identify) or provide opt-out that doesn’t affect other features of the vehicle so companies can’t play games.
I don't dispute that. But, I don't think owning the title means the car needs to be fully operational.
Titles to ratty, broken down, cars are bought and sold every day... aren't they? And, just because it's shiny doesn't mean it's a great car either. It could be a great sculpture.
I think the issues at play here are more about service and warranty contracts as well as buyer expectations. Having the title just means I own a giant hunk of metal and plastic, no?
I didn't make any of that up.... have you ever removed an onstar unit from a vehicle? Did you ever try to install linux on an xbox360?
Radios these days are software defined. They can sit on the same chip that uses a trusted bootloader and also provides an engine control module. Marketing departments can and will bend and pervert engineering specifications to highlight the consumer benefits and minimize the profit motive.
Assuming you can even get to the antenna without special tools... you're just going to cut the antenna so short that the radio can't get a signal? On a hunch?
What if the SOC in your vehicle has to download a rolling encryption key every week in order to activate?
There are plenty of parts of the US with really poor cell coverage. Even if everything's working perfectly, there's no guarantee that your car can update. Having a car die because it couldn't phone home is both a lawsuit waiting to happen and a potential PR nightmare.
What about satellite? What if the ping isn't time based but mileage based... what are the odds you drive 500-1000 miles without passing a cell-site? The car doesn't have to go completely dead either. It can go into a "limp mode" or just have features disabled.
Going back and forth with measures and counter-measures besmirches the point. Cars have to be serviced and this may be considered just another aspect of it.
I'm not suggesting that this sort of thing is necessarily a good thing(tm) but, it may be viewed as such by some and it's possible.
Isn't it the consumer's prerogative and responsibility to decide?
Not to mention, lawsuits and PR nightmares can be factored into a business case analysis. VW actually went ahead and defrauded the US government in diesel-gate and they're still an almost $100 billion company.
> government is utterly unable to remotely turn off, monitor, or impose distance quotas
This is reality already? I'm starting to think maybe computers were a mistake. I mean how much more screwed up can our world get before it turns into a cyberpunk hell?
I'd love to see new car manufacturers doing new things and appealing to different segments of the market, but I imagine there's so much barrier to entry, so many regulations to adhere to, that as a new car manufacturer it'd be near impossible to do anything new/different at this point, unless you're ready to throw billions into it; and even then, the regulations/laws are extensive enough that you'd end up making something 98% the same as what already existed.
> reasonably sized as in the 50s and 60s. Fire all your designers, go back to whatever your models were in 1965
What alternate dimension are you from? My older brother had a 60's Ford Fairlane when I was growing up. My first car was a 67 mustang. I had a friend with a 68 Camaro. I knew someone else that had multiple Thunderbirds from that era.
These were not small cars. The Mustang and Camaro were the size of a full size sedan today , if not bigger. The cross sections of the doors were very large, they just aren't very space efficient at all. They're only small relative to the other cars of the era, and I wouldn't call their size reasonable in any real way.
Those are the coupes. The sedans, such as the Fairlane and Thunderbird? Those were about as big as a modern full size crew cab pickup.
> The Mustang and Camaro were the size of a full size sedan today , if not bigger
This is verifiably false with three minutes of searching, which I did on my cellphone as I sit by a campfire. As an owner of both a 1965 Mustang and a 2015 Explorer, the difference in size between these vehicles is comical. I've rented a 2020 Camry that was larger in every dimension. It got great gas mileage, but small it was not.
1967 Ford Mustang
Length: 183.6"
Width: 70.9"
Height: 51.6"
2020 Toyota Camry
Length: 192.1"
Width: 72.4"
Height: 56.9"
The 1965 Mustang was even smaller and lighter. The 1969-1970 Mustangs, while larger, are still smaller in every dimension than a modern Camry. Some older cars were indeed boats, but almost all modern American automobiles are boats, and a lot of this has to do with the laws that regulate and shape the products created by the American automotive industry.
Perhaps I remember the mustang as larger than it was because my next car was significantly smaller, a 240z, but it is at the large end of the compact cars, which have been getting larger themselves as of late, as tends to happen. Actually, most the popular cars have gotten much larger in recent decades. In 2002, the Camry was much closer in size to the Mustang, still about 6" longer, but skinnier.
I'm not sure why you compared the Mustang to an Explorer though. I mentioned the thunderbird as being comparable to trucks, and those were well over 200 inches in the 60's. It's still an exaggeration to say that's as large as a truck with a crew cab in most cases, but the 209.4" length of a 1969 Thunderbird sedan is slightly longer than a Ford F150 with a regular bed size at 209.1". They were all, by most measures, much larger than their comparable categories today, and much larger than those categories a decade or two ago.
I have noticed that modern sedans are MASSIVE. Every time I have the displeasure of renting a car they force upon me a full-size sedan (they seem to never have 'compact' vehicles available), and the cars are gigantic, feel heavy, visibility is terrible because the windows have been made smaller and smaller and the A-pillars larger and larger in a competition for higher safety ratings. When I visit Europe I'm jealous of how much smaller the sedans are- everything is just a little more narrow, a little thinner, and yes, have a manual transmission. The American market seems to put people into cars that look and drive like military tanks.
You are comparing a two door sports car to a four door sedan. Yes some cars have become larger, but they are also incredibly more safe. The doors are thicker and reinforced to protect you in an accident. The roof is taller and stronger, and the pillars are reinforced steel so you don't get crushed in a rollover.
They still make the Mazda Miata, BMW 1 series, Toyota BRZ, etc. These are all small cars, although I'm not going to research all of their dimensions. The truth is there is a very small minority of people who want cars smaller than that, and it's not profitable to produce them.
> Those are the coupes. The sedans, such as the Fairlane and Thunderbird? Those were about as big as a modern full size crew cab pickup.
I’m reminded of my grandparent’s 1979 Cadillac (Not sure of the model). It barely fit in the garage. They parked their Chevy Suburban in that same garage.
And also: heavier, less fuel efficient, and more dangerous cars.
Basically, OP is "graciously" willing to give up his manual transmission if we provide him a car that suits his style and comfort at the expense of everyone else.
If it's in your budget I highly recommend test driving the Porsche Macan.
It has a screen but as far as I can tell it's not required for anything that doesn't implicitly require a screen (i.e. GPS).
Overall the car is amazingly well designed. The tactile experience is there, you can feel your way around everything without moving your eyes from the road/immediate dash area. It still has an analog clock. I also feel like there are a lot of advanced, car enthusiast friendly features I have yet to explore.
It's also a stupidly practical car. I've frequently loaded the back with cinder blocks and bricks, filled it with a small arboretum of house plants, drum sander, multiple bikes, small couches, etc. I feel a bit silly loading up a Porche at home depot, but boy does it do the job well.
And at the same time, when you're getting on the highway it has all the power you could want, and is just a blast to drive around at night on empty roads. Comfort wise it feels like it has exactly what you want, but nothing more.
Overall the car is amazingly well designed. The tactile experience is there, you can feel your way around everything without moving your eyes from the road/immediate dash area.
Not anymore, unfortunately. In the current gen (2022+) Macan they got rid of the buttons in favor of a glossy touch panel. It looks cleaner, but it won't by the time you get home from the dealership.
And the EV Macan due out in 2024 will be even more screen. I'm sure it will have the same 3 screen setup as Taycan, with the curved instrument cluster, landscape main dash screen, and portrait lower screen for HVAC and charging controls.
At least still has high quality physical buttons for A/C and the steering wheel controls, which is most of what you're likely to use while moving. My least favorite thing about the Taycan is the capacitive AC controls.
Right. This amazing car refuses to open its trunk from inside when being in park mode and engine switched off when you are not in Home Screen on central panel.
Another interesting issue is compatibility porsche id and apple car play. it seems the car play kicks out porsche id 3 times out of 4 given that you use your iphone as identification means.
Right. This amazing car refuses to open its trunk from inside when being in park mode and engine switched off when you are not in Home Screen on central panel.
Huh? What generation is this? I use that button all the time in my 95B.2 while CarPlay is up. Last time was a couple of days ago, hauling a load of pavers home from Lowe's.
Another interesting issue is compatibility porsche id and apple car play. it seems the car play kicks out porsche id 3 times out of 4 given that you use your iphone as identification means.
Yeah, the Porsche ID thing is a tire fire. It almost always fails to log in immediately after startup, showing an error message before it even bothers to attempt reconnection. Then, if you leave it alone, it reconnects on its own and usually works as expected. About 5%-10% of the time it won't log in successfully until the next drive cycle.
Porsche should update their famous "There's a reason why most rocket scientists are German" ad to include "... and why most software developers are American." (I'm sure the PCM OEM is American, but it would be a well-deserved hot take.)
Pretty cool to read about somebody using their Porsche the same way I use my 12yo Toyota Rav4! My record is still fitting a full-sized washer and dryer in the back...
Don't feel silly for utilizing your vehicle's capabilities!
Past Nissan Cube owner here reporting that you can stuff a twin mattress against the ceiling of the car, supported by the heads of the driver and passenger, for several blocks.
What kind of bale of hay? Where I live, a bale of hay weighs something like 200kg, total weight would be 1800kg which I don't think any car could muster (nor actually fit), but seems you're using "bale of hay" as a different measurement than what I have in mind.
I second this, Macan owner since 6 years and have not been more satisfied going 0-60 in 6 seconds in a car that i have loaded with close to 50 gravel bags from Home Depot :) oh and going back to original post, two main reasons i chose the car was 1. Way it drives and 2. Tactile buttons
If you’re looking for an all-electric with the same feeling, the Hyundai Kona fits the bill. Everything is a button or knob, except the GPS. It’s a breath of fresh air after the Tesla and the bmw i3.
I don't own a car anymore, but it's something I online window shop sometimes. It seems like Lexus is going to be the last luxury car brand to keep physical controls instead of all screen.
> Olympian believes in reducing the number of buttons and switches to simplify the cockpit. We take a voice-first approach to control infotainment, HVAC, seats, doors, and lighting systems.
This sounds like the opposite of OP's request for physical controls.
That sounds like a nightmare. So you have to forcibly silence everyone in the car to do anything? Even if I'm alone I would prefer silence and pushing buttons instead of having a conversation with a machine.
Yeah, this is a completely valid complaint. How in the world did automakers manage to get vehicles on the market that require you to look away from your 70 mph trajectory on a highway to visually confirm that you clicked "OK" instead of "Cancel"? Major safety design failures. You know it the first time you encounter it.
> you also need to produce cars that are as visually appealing and reasonably sized as in the 50s and 60s. Fire all your designers, go back to whatever your models were in 1965, and begin anew.
Safety considerations aside, the aesthetics of the rocket and atomic age reflect the hope on humanity's future that was dominating back then. Automotive designs of late 10's early 20's are a tiny bit fancier than in previous couple decades, but they don't look futuristic, they tend to look more aggressive instead. That's also because there's demand for that aesthetic in our era.
To change the way cars look, change the way you live your life.
Look into the Dacia Sandero, then. When they launched they were about six grand in the highest trim spec, which included a space to fit a stereo. Not the stereo, just the space to fit it.
Manual door locks, manual windey windows, manual seats, buttons and dials, mechanical gauges. All based on "proven technology" first-gen Renault Megane components, so it's easy to fix.
I'd get something like that if I needed a car tbh, but luckily I can do everything with my bicycle. The new sandero starts at 10k, which is still quite a budget for a lot of people
I picked up a 1994 Toyota Pickup for this exact reason. It's so insanely simple, they didn't even give it a proper name. One of the last true work horses, if it wasn't for that damn rusty frame.
'92 would be an RRC. Get a P38, they're a lot more "liveable" as a daily and they don't rot anything like as badly. Also an RRC is insanely expensive, and P38s have only just started the upward curve.
Are they now? That's a shame; I sold my last one to a scrapyard after someone stole both cats out of it, a week before I was going to move - I just didn't have time to deal with it.
I was always skeptical of the P38s because of the airbags. How do you deal with that over the long term?
Change the bags every ten years or so. You can get aftermarket ones by Arnotts, but Dunlop still do them too. Apparently they're used in ambulances, too.
I won't say I've never had EAS problems but it's never left me stuck, unlike coil springs.
Coachbuild the inside, you can basically be rolls royce here because you're low volume.
Obviously all the knobs and switches would be built with reliability in mind.
Sound system I was thinking would just be a good bluetooth speaker system and a phone mount. Dont have to worry about android auto or carplay or sound system or gps going out of date. its just your phone.
As someone who hates how ugly modern cars have become, I can also acknowledge the extraordinary leap in safety they've achieved since then. Many of the rules are designed around safety.
Although a counterpoint to this is the giant A pillars limit visibility so much as to be dangerous themselves.
I almost got t-bones a few weeks ago due to my pillars. It was a rural intersection that’s at an angle and I looked both ways. I didn’t notice the road was at an angle where an approaching car would be hidden. I pulled out, and if I had been .2 seconds faster I might’ve been dead. A van zoomed by going 60 and I braked all of a few inches from getting hit.
Stupid of me, of course. But it’s easy to miss a bad combination of factors.
There's a website out there somewhere about the issue of not seeing cross traffic because it's approaching the intersection at just the right speed to stay hidden behind the A pillar of your car. Ah, it looks like it involved cyclists [1].
OTOH there's also a fairly simply fix invented by an 8th grader... [2]
The giant A pillars are a nuisance for sure, but you're supposed to bob and weave your head with any size A-pillar. Even with the smaller old A-pillars you can hide plenty of things behind it.
If you're ever in the Netherlands you should book a driving lesson for shits and giggles. Not claiming we're all amazing drivers, but we sure do have hard driving exams when compared to the USA.
In America, in most states, Driver's Ed is optional, which I think is beyond ridiculous. People expect your parents to teach you to drive, which leads to gaps in knowledge (A significant percentage of people in the USA don't think you should keep right except when passing), and in some cases, flat-out wrong teachings.
Even when there IS a Driver's Ed class, there's not enough behind-the-wheel time. They need to include hands-on lessons on emergency maneuvers, especially in the rain, so people can get an understanding for how the car will handle, rather than a trial-by-fire the first time they have to slam their brakes in the rain.
I wonder if you could somehow selectively lens the windshield glass near the edges to provide a "fisheye" effect for greater visibility around the pillars... like bifocals or something, not an entirely fisheyed windshield, just a small zone on each side.
I rented a Toyota recently. The A-pillars were so huge that I thought I'd better drive around near the rental company for a while to get used to it. So I did that, concentrating on driving safely instead of concentrating on navigating. I ended up on a hospital campus, in a lane intended only for ambulances. There was no visibility for cars shorter than ambulances, and I crashed on the way out. (At about 10 km/h, so no-one was hurt - sorry for the anticlimax.)
meh, my wife's car does that, but to me it's not the same. I think if I can put into words what I like about manual transmissions, it's more than just the control to change the gears, it's the actual tactile feeling of removing power from the drivetrain (via clutch), then re-applying it. it's the cliche feeling of "connection" to the car, road, and what's happening. But I understand why the manual is dying. Most people don't want it, today's automatics are much better suited for towing (thus eliminating the manual in trucks and SUVs), and the top of the top of performance cars paddle shift light years faster than anyone could in a proper manual transmission.
Or how about just being able to anticipate the power band around a corner? Being able to downshift on a hill without thinking about it. Those are things you don't even realize you do in a manual, that you do.
case in point, me flooring it on a left hand turn in my moms prius and having to wait a good 500ms for the thing to start moving at all.
I know exactly what my manual does in first gear and when, I don't think about it, it's an extension of myself.
I've given up with manual, as a technology, since I've used an EV that didn't have any switching transmission. Just fixed gear ratio. The feeling is better than manual. You always have full power available. There is no RPM regime where an EV won't be able to apply maximum torque. Manual can't beat that feeling.
Though I will also say that a modern automatic doesn't need 500 meters. It works almost as well as manual. If you floor the pedal if shifts to apply more torque.
> There is no RPM regime where an EV won't be able to apply maximum torque.
Sure there is! Electrics have maximum torque at zero RPM. As RPM increases, their torque drops off. Some cars will have a torque limit that provides for constant torque (less than the motor would be capable of), but as RPM continued to increase, eventually the torque falls off.
> You always have full power available.
This is also incorrect, but less so than the max torque claim, as power is torque times RPM (times a constant), so as RPM rises and torque falls, power is closer to constant than torque is.
> This is also incorrect, but less so than the max torque claim
Eh, I think you're being a bit pedantic here.
The point was that in an EV, you always have the maximum torque for a given speed available. Whereas in an ICE, you'll have to downshift, which in some automatic cars can take a second or two. You can suddenly floor the gas and go nowhere, whereas an EV takes off immediately. Even a 600 horsepower hypercar will be a little sluggish if you floor it at 55 mph in the top gear.
Not sure what your point there is? EVs are still fixed-gear ratio and provide maximum torque over the entire range. The graph you linked just shows that?
Surely they don't. But that's not what it's about. It's about the fact that I can't reliably gauge how this car works or have good feedback in comparison to my manual.
I would argue you have better feedback and can understand better how it works than manual. There is a fixed ratio gear connecting motor and wheels. Simpler than clutch and transmission by miles. The motor works with electricity and a motor controller, all software. It has reliable performance characteristics.
I drove a manual years ago. It was fun then, but now I prefer the paddle-shift of my "semi-auto", which is still going strong without fault for 15 years.
I can downshift before the hill to get revs, and prevent the auto-shift as I go up the hill. Or I can downshift to use engine as brake. No clutch to worry about, and my hands never leave wheel. Long-press the paddle to return to auto for the boring sections. Awesome usability! Could never go back to manual, the paddle-shifters are too much fun and too easy!
> Or how about just being able to anticipate the power band around a corner? Being able to downshift on a hill without thinking about it. Those are things you don't even realize you do in a manual, that you do.
You can do that in an automatic, too. Reach over to the gear selector, move it from D to a lower gear.
I can honestly say I don't give a shit whether I'm driving a manual or an automatic. I don't really think about gear changing in either.
But anyone that drives a manual will let you know it's mostly about the clutch and how you use it, rather than choosing what gear you're in. Using a clutch just right can produce amazing amount of torque just when you need it. Automatic clutch can be incredibly efficient, but it simply can't know what you want to do.
> Using a clutch just right can produce amazing amount of torque just when you need it.
Nailed it. Not to dismiss those romanticizing clutching and shifting, but that is incidental. The entire point of a manual transmission is performance. It's control over torque that delivers it.
I love that I can pump RPMs into the red before clutching into gear, the vigor of that power, G forces pulling the body against the seat, chirping wheels in 4th gear at 70mph, going up a steep hill with a quickness. (Crud, did I just romanticize torque?)
I find it hard to believe the ICE manual will ever die completely so long as there is a rally to race. No matter how quick an automatic electric is, it's not going to beat decent drivers of ICE manuals. But hopefully someday they'll all be rice burners, for the enviro.
I will point out that modern electrics don't do automatic anymore. The "automatic" transmission is all software. There is a fixed gear ratio. EV motors have almost perfectly flat torque curves across the entire RPM spectrum. That feeling when you pump the RPMs and let the clutch go? An EV could give you that from 0 to 180kph without ever having to switch gears. An EV doesn't need to be quicker than a manual. There is nothing to be quicker with. There is no gear shift.
The electric motor just turns into a generator and charges the battery. Engine breaking with an EV is literally refilling your tank, so to speak. The modern EVs are pretty smart about it and will also apply the breaks sneakily if the engine can't bring up enough resistance (due to battery being charged, too much change in a short time, etc.)
I will also add that the break pads in EVs are criminally underused to the point that they reach their maximum service life with barely any usage on them.
If you want a comparison, it's basically like flicking on the little dynamo engines on a bicycle and then turning on the light. It'll slow you down a lot quicker than without the light on. Same principle here and works just as well.
Regenerative braking is not Engine braking, which itself is not at all like using brakes other than it slows the vehicle down. Though it is probably most commonly used to spare brake wear, the importance of it is to help the driver maintain control of the vehicle. Active use of engine braking by shifting into a lower gear helps control speed while driving down very steep and long slopes, and to maintain better control in serpentine curves while at high speed.
The simple fact of the matter is it is not possible to engine brake in an EV, because it is not possible to reduce to a lower gear. EV is better than ICE in nearly if not every other way, but let's not take it too far. The driver of an manual ICE vehicle will be able to have better control at faster speeds than an EV on curvy, non-flat roads solely due to the ability to engine brake, but this probably isn't legal driving.
How is regenerative breaking not the same as engine breaking? Other than the lack of ICE in the EV, the engine is being used to slow down the vehicle, it has the exact same effect.
Well it’s not the same in a similar fashion of “1 + 1 = 2” is not literally the same as “3 - 1 = 2”. Maybe they accomplish similar goals but downshifting to brake can be done for as many gears as the transmission contains in a stepwise fashion. But without a transmission in a single speed vehicle with regenerative braking it’s more of a “spectrum” of braking and not directly controllable by the driver.
And for the record I believe “engine braking” is a slightly different mechanism than “downshift braking” but could be wrong here - my manual passenger vehicles don’t have explicit “engine brake” controls but a semi truck might.
Downshift Braking is Engine Braking, it's the same thing. And there is absolutely no reason an EV motor could not emulate the exact same behaviour as a stick shift. It's all electronic, you could just emulate the behaviour of a stick shift vehicle there and give the user a joystick with stick shift labels on top. All the motor has to do is to either apply regenerative breaking at a certain efficiency value. The electronics can ramp regenerative breaking from 0% to 100% in any amount of steps you like.
Yeah. And the car is just second guessing you in general. I can blip the throttle in my automatic and the car acts like nothing happened at all. Or I’ll put my foot to the floor, nothing happens, then a few seconds later it downshifts and jerks forward. But it’s easy on long journeys and the road is not a racetrack so I can’t complain.
I drove an AT rental with a "manual" mode. The AT kept wanting to sit in high gears, which require a lot of torque at low RPMs, which ended up hitting this funny resonant spot in the car and cause an annoying rumble. I ended up running it in manual mode and lower gears.
Rental fleets are so bad now, the first thing I do is figure out how to manually operate the tranny. Then Ill downshift 15 seconds before needing the power.
I recently had a car with "10" speeds (it was actually a CVT) and to get any passing power on the highway I had to drop it into 3rd.
Shift shift shift shift shift shift shift and then pathetic engine would scream like nothing Ive heard before.
Yes, you'd think the car would get the most aggressive when the pedal is to the metal. Instead, I noticed that a strong, but gradual increase on the gas will provide more power.
Any idiot can see a 2022 ford truck is better than being hit by my 1988 Saab, which a 4 year old is visible over the hood on, as compared to a ford, which, I think I probably couldn't see my wife over the hood.
That's an ironman, mate. Pedestrian safety is a huge part of modern safety regulations for vehicles. It's why the Mini stopped being mini. Between that and side impact standards they couldn't keep that low hood and door sills.
I drove a Triumph Spitfire for a while. Any time I took it out of town I took the state highways or country roads, because not only would that thing fit under a truck trailer, at a stoplight I could reach out and touch the bumper on most vehicles. Anything bigger than a sedan and I had to reach -up- to do it. I was only ever safe in that vehicle in the same way that motorcyclists are safe - constant vigilance and pre-planning, which I learned as a bicyclist.
I looked on IIHS for the ford F-150 and it gives a green rating for the pedestrian safety. On further inspection, this is because there is a type of automatic braking. Now, I am happy to have that system, but that doesn't have much to do with the shape of the car at all.
The issue isn't just that cars have gotten bigger (we could compare an 80s, 90's, 20's, 2010's civic to see this through one line) but also the trend towards more SUV, XUV and Trucks being sold compared to cars.
Mechanical controls are safety-related - it's harder and more expensive to engineer a crash-safe interior with knobs and such. That's why with modern crash testing you saw a very rapid depreciation of pull-out knobs and the like. It's also harder to manufacture and repair. Electronic controls? You run power and a data bus to the unit, and you're done.
I don't think people understand how much engineering goes into a dash/interior in a passenger car, at least from a company that prioritizes crash safety. Everything is designed to give just the right amount when hit by a body flying around in crash. Even the lower part of the dash is designed to crush just the right amount if you "submarine" in a head-on crash - enough to stop you, but not enough to shatter your knees.
On the other hand, there will be fewer crashes due to the driver having to take his/her eyes of the road in order to squint at which identical button out of 25 turns the blower down one notch.
Were there fewer crashes when these cars were the norm? No. [1,2,3,4]
The number of crashes per year has remained remarkably stable year over year, despite the number of driven miles and number of cars rising enormously. Conversely the number of fatalities due to crashes has dropped considerably.
So despite driving many, many more miles then they did previously, people aren't dying in crashes at a greater rate (total crashes is harder to track due to intermittent and inconsistent reporting data).
One of the contributor to low fatalities-per-mile was congestion, my guess is that while miles driven per year increased every year average/median driving speed decreased due to traffic up to 2020 when congestion decreased for the first time.
I grew up learning to drive a manual transmission car. Awesome. I loved the feeling of driving and shifting gears up the hilly, mountainous, twisty horrible roads in Jamaica. Exhilarating!
But cars got better. I got older, and now automatic transmissions are so much more efficient than manual transmissions * for ordinary people *.
We're not talking about people who love driving here. We are talking about people who drive an ordinary car. People who just want to commute and relax. We are not talking about Porsche or Konignsegg's (sp) latest car with a manual transmission.
These days I'm in a taxi in Thailand almost every day, and half of the drivers use a manual transmission and the other half use an automatic transmission. I think the reason is that cars with manual transmissions are older and cheaper.
But at the same time, the driving experience in those taxis with the manual transmission is horrible. Herky-jerky, and most of the drivers don't even know how to use the manual correctly.
I drove a manual for about 20 years and I still really enjoy them, but there is one thing that made me happily leave them behind: stop-and-go traffic. Not having to clutch constantly when driving in the city is a big enough win that I'm willing to give up the fun of a manual for it. But I do sometimes miss having a stick on a windy mountain road.
I currently use a (automatic) borrowed car from the shop while my (manual) car is being repaired. I mostly do city-driving.
One of the biggest issues with the automatic is stop-and-go traffic. It's absolutely trash at accelerating smoothly but fast, and I have no choice but to either go very slowly forward to not make it janky, or really aggressive acceleration. With a manual car, smooth-but-fast acceleration is easy to achieve, but with this (Audi Q3) borrow car, it seems short of impossible to achieve.
More pet-peeves of automatic VS manual I'm experiencing are outlined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32591426 but smooth city driving is probably what I miss the most currently, as that is mostly how I spend my driving.
The latest subaru forester is absolutely insane when it comes to how much control you have over acceleration. I can creep forward at agonizingly slow speeds without riding the brake, stomp it for mostly instant torque, and everything in between. It's way smoother than any manual, automatic 6-spd, or DSG I've ever driven.
Oh and you can downshift to engine brake and the Sport model has flappy paddles to boot.
There are still a lot of more-or-less-shit automatics being manufactured. Even if they collectively has gotten quite a bit better over the years.
The six-speed automatic in my KIA for example, is from the past three years and it is not entirely great. It is perfectly fine 98% of the time, but those last two percent...
* Shifting speed is highly unpredictable on kick-down
* In certain temperatures it will slam the shift from first to second even when taking of very softly
* It will randomly decide to stay in a needlessly low gear on long, gentle inclines, even though there is plenty of power in higher gears if you force an up-shift in manual mode
* On low-speed sharp inclines (like my own residental street) it desperately stays in second gear to the point of almost stalling the engine, before does a brutal panic-downshift to first gear
But in standard highway driving or city-stop-and-go it is really nice.
I'm not sure what country you are in. In the US, I believe the Q3 still always comes with a torque-converter automatic. A quick search seems to show lots of people on enthusiast boards complaining about the shift programming on the current generation. But, also lots of contradictory reports. It makes me think it is a UX issue where the programming works for some operators' "pedal language" and not others.
We have an older generation Q3, which replaced a slightly smaller car that had a manual transmission and similar turbo 4-cylinder engine. I was a little bitter about this marital compromise in the very beginning, but learned how the car behaves and have no problems today. I only use the "manual" gear selection for speed control on steep grades. To me, it can provide smoother acceleration than I ever got in 30 years of driving manuals. It shifts quicker and with more continuous power delivery compared to any manual operation I've achieved or witnessed as a passenger. The change is learning to anticipate and speak to the car with the throttle instead of anticipating and speaking with the clutch pedal and stick.
For fleet efficiency reasons, these modern automatics will prefer high gears and also use clutches to lock-out the torque converter and avoid slippage. Combine that with fuel saving coasting modes and you can potentially reach states where a small turbo engine is at low RPM with low boost pressure and a high gearing load. If you want to accelerate right then, all these bad conditions need to be reversed through a kick-down procedure, and you maximize the feeling of a delayed surge in acceleration.
It's not the same transmission as the current generation Q3, but one thing I've noticed is that there is a slight risk of this sort of stuttering/slow take off when braking to a low speed without stopping. If I am at a complete stop with brake pedal depressed, the starts are very predictable. But braking into a turn lane or driveway gets the car into its most hesitant state if I try to accelerate back out of this slow roll.
That is not my experience *at all*. There must be something wrong with that particular transmission.
I love driving manual, but a long stretch of having to commute in stop and go traffic made me switch to automatic, and it has always been a buttery smooth experience for me.
There is nothing worse than the smell of burning clutch in the morning.
Smoothness depends on automatic transmission type.
My hybrid Toyota with CVT is a pleasure to drive in a city. Smooth, no gear changes just linear acceleration. Any other car even those with dual clutch feels inferior at least in city traffic.
In Italy the driving test is on manual transmission and many people use manual.
I trained in Rome, parking on the left side downhill (so backward is uphill), it was tough, but learned a lot of tricks in the process to prevent stalling. You also become very attuned to the clutch
I do love manual transmission, but the purpose is to have fun, not for daily usage.
I’m doubting the person in Italy has a need for ice and snow driving.
Where I am it might snow or ice once a year. However I do own an SUV that has a snow mode. It starts in second to avoid spinning the wheels and will let you manually cycle through the 8 speeds if you want.
The 3 times I can remember there was snow in Rome the city would completely lock, with cars abandoned in the middle of the road (picture post zombie apocalypse kind of thing), so you can't drive even if you want to, because there is no room on the road.
A lot of modern cars have an automatic brake that keeps your car from going downhill in those situations. Some are smoother, some are weirder, but it works.
Generically, that's called a hill holder, and there were pre-electronic implementations. My 1986 Subaru BRAT had one. I can't speak to how it was to drive; it never worked. The hill holder specifically, the rest of the car mostly worked.
I've rented a BMW a few years ago on vacation in Portugal. It had manual transmission and a system to prevent rolling back on hills. Those things are not incompatible.
Automatic transmission is much worse than manual in mountain roads and uphill.
But I always forget that a lot of people have no idea on how to drive uphill with manual transmission.
They're talking about taking off when stopped on a hill. Pressing the clutch and releasing the brake will result in the car rolling backward down the hill until you get enough forward momentum going to take off. Newer drivers freak-out on the rolling backward bit.
I remember an earlier discussion on HN where different people around the world learned different techniques for preventing the rollback. I remember lots of Europeans saying that's what the parking brake is for. Here in the States we're taught to let out the clutch until it starts to bite and then release the brake. You may still roll backward a few inches but that's no big deal.
I actually enjoyed the challenge of that. The problem with stop-and-go driving, especially in LA where I made the transition to automatic, is that it can go on for a very long time. My left leg would get sore. Starting up a hill typically only has to be done once.
People say they hate driving manuals in stop-and-go-traffic and I don't get it - maybe it's because I've been driving them as my daily driver for over 30 years? My left foot and right hand just take care of what needs to be done without my even having to think about it. Essentially I am driving an automatic! :)
By the time I got to that kind of traffic my left foot and right hand were already on automatic. Doesn't feel like a chore because half the time I'm not even aware of what they're doing - they just do it.
I don't even notice it. I would assume you're using a hydraulic clutch? I thought those were pretty much the standard (ha!) since 80's. Maybe I'm just getting a workout without realizing it? I do know whenever I drive my wife's car - which is an automatic because she also hates driving a manual transmission in traffic - my left foot nearly goes through the floorboard before it realizes there's no pedal there! :)
I still get befuddled when parking her car because I never remember to shift into park and I'm wondering why I can't turn the ignition switch to off and pull the key out. Gets me every time!
This was 20-30 years ago. I drove two different manual transmissions in LA, a Volvo 240 and an Infiniti G20. I'm pretty sure the Volvo had a mechanical (non-hydraulic) clutch. Not sure about the G20.
Yeah, a mechanical clutch would be a BEAR!!! All my personal vehicles have always had a hydraulic clutch. They make it so simple your left foot can just do it without you much noticing it.
Rally transmissions at least are very much manual. Along with most other race transmissions. They use dog-ring gearboxes, which are just really beefy synchronizing rings that let you just slam it into gear without decoupling from the engine. The paddles are electric, but they tell some pneumatic system to push a lever forwards or backwards.
F1 might use some decoupling? But I would expect them to work like most other race transmissions, by not decoupling.
There are computers that control the rev-matching, but that's technically on the engine side of things. There are sensors on the gearbox that let the controller know when to add throttle, but it's still very much not the responsibility of the transmission. There are also downshift protection to make sure you don't over-rev the engine, but this is also on the engine side of things, but it does block the signal from the paddle shifters.
This feature is on ordinary cars too (sometimes called 'semi automatics')
I actually have it on my car, there are paddles behind the steering wheel that can shift the gears up and down. It's a bit of a gimmick for ordinary driving as you can just let the car choose the appropriate gear, but I guess if you want to shunt down a few gears quickly on a hill to get some engine braking it can be useful
I use this for people that get easily carsick, it allows me to pull away in 2nd gear rather than first and that means fewer gearshifts and more smooth starting. It's not super good for the clutch but it certainly beats cleaning up...
There’s nothing misleading about it. Shift paddles are pretty standard on cars with automatic gearboxes. The only difference is that outside of sports cars “consumer” gearboxes will usually restrict the range they’ll let you use with semi-automatic shifting and will override that if you redline or bottom out.
It’s completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand: whether the user or the computer initiates the gear change does not change the efficiency of the gearbox.
When manuals are discussed on the internet, it’s the manual clutch which is the central difference, not what’s essentially a firmware feature or lack thereof. That’s what’s mentioned in pretty much every comment other than your nitpicks.
F1 isn’t even about max performance, it’s about trying to maintain an element of driver skill as a factor of outcomes. It’s why they outlawed the Williams continuously variable transmission (CVT). A lot in F1 is done to maintain the suspense/excitement of a race for the TV audience.
> F1 and rally cars haven’t been manual for decades.
In racing, but particularly in F1, you can't leave a single millisecond on the table because the competitors won't. So F1 gearboxes shift in milliseconds which is obviously impossible for a human to do with a clutch pedal. And that is all F1 teams optimize for, speed.
When driving purely for fun (as most street sports cars are used) there is no stopwatch, so it hardly matters if the shift happens in 10 milliseconds or a 1000.
What matters is how much fun it is and that is where a good shifter and a clutch pedal with a nice feel shine.
> What matters is how much fun it is and that is where a good shifter and a clutch pedal with a nice feel shine.
The comment I replied to was talking about efficiency, and my reply was in those terms as well. If what matters to you is the car equivalent of putting your audio cables on pyramids you do you, but this is not “what matters” to what we were talking about. It couldn’t be any further really.
It's basically 'daily driver' versus 'enthusiast' or 'track car' now even for cars in that bracket.
One big advantage in the second hand market is that if you look for an automatic you can be fairly sure that the engine won't have been overrevved. (The engine computer registers this and if you read it out you can see how long and how often it was overrevved, for stick shift cars this isn't unusual at all, on automatics it just doesn't happen.)
Specifically, automatics accounted for around 10 percent of Ford Europe sales volume in 2017. That figure has climbed to over 31 percent in the first month of the 2020 calendar year.
They weren't for about 100 years, but automatics are now mostly better than manuals in terms of performance and economy. Unfortunately, some the the things that make them "better" like 8 gears makes the driving feel worse, with constant shifting. The other big gain is in improved torque conversion.
Automatics traditionally had a single clutch and a viscous coupling to convert smooth the torque between gear shifts. Switching gears was slow and the transmission as a whole was less fuel efficient.
Modern automatic gearboxes have dual clutches and two separate sets of gears for even and odd numbers. You alternate between them as you shift up and down. Shifting is faster and smoother.
(The system isn’t perfect. If you switch to manual selection of gears the transmission computer sometimes guessing wrong — while you’re in 3rd and accelerating it’ll get 4th ready for on the even-numbers clutch, so if you suddenly brake and shift down there is a longer delay while the transmission shifts to 2nd instead.)
That’s not quite how traditional autos worked, they also have sets of clutches and bands, controlled by a complex hydraulic system. Modern automatics are electronically actuated and are basically killing the need for DCTs, with VW Group and Hyundai (and some exotic makers) being the lone holdouts in the U.S. market.
DCTs are still best for that sweet-sweet 0-60 time. The max stall RPMs on a stock torque converted transmission is probably 2300rpms at the most, while Porsche PDK can launch at redline and modulate torque delivery precisely.
I don't know of a car with a torque converted that can hit sixty in under 3.0 seconds, but the Corvette and 911 can both do so with RWD due to the bonkers launches these cars manage.
The BMW M5 has a ZF 8HP and pulls off sub 3s 0-60s in CS trim. The new xDrive M3 comes close. I’m sure there are others. The key obviously is to have a torque converter stall speed that’s in powerband.
Yeah, you're right. I realize that I eluded to it in the subsequent statement, but didn't outright say it, but I meant to say,
> I don't know of a RWD car with a torque converted that can hit sixty in under 3.0 seconds on street tires,
It's insane what the C8 can do with RWD on street tires. Being able to launch at full HP without destroying the rear tires is amazing. DCTs have near EV levels of torque management capabilities.
So with the C8 and 911 they can’t be characterized as merely RWD for straight line acceleration purposes because of weight distribution. One of the biggest issues with launching is that by the time weight transfer happens tires are already spinning, so to get a good launch you want a softer suspension which would ruin the car’s performance at corner exit. Being mid or rear engined helps there because you’re starting with 55-60% of the mass over the rear wheels which is closer to AWD than RWD for launch traction.
I find it highly unlikely an automatic would have better fuel economy than a manual.
I saw a study from, I think it was Volvo, that basically concluded that while trained drivers focusing on driving efficiently could get better fuel economy out of a manual, 'normal' people driving normally got better fuel efficiency out of an automatic. And this was a good 10 years ago, so automatics have only gotten better.
Training on manual cars also improved last 10 years. Don't know about other countries but here fuel economy is a mandatory part of training. Recent manual cars provide indicators on when to switch. You can combine that signal and training for better fuel economy. TBH, I don't know how that compares with automatic.
At one point I had two manual and two automatic Citroën XMs, with identical 2.0 litre fuel-injected engines. On average driving, all four got 32mpg.
Bear in mind this was a relatively primitive late-80s Zf 4HP18 gearbox, with a lockup clutch in 3rd and 4th, giving similar ratios to 4th and 5th with the manual box. If anything the manual box let the engine rev a couple of hundred RPM higher in 5th, but the auto box would drop briefly out of lockup on moderate acceleration in top allowing the engine to reach a bit higher speed.
Mostly that the OEM's engineers can choose to tune it to upshift or resist downshifting in situations where the average consumer with a manual would just wind it out.
Why do you think it unlikely an automatic can match or exceed a manual in fuel economy? Computers can better fit the torque needs to the most efficient RPM than most humans will, it's not a hard problem to solve.
Traditionally (and this is from the very olden days) manuals had an extra gear over automatics, which is why they'd have better fuel economy. Also less drivetrain loss. Nowadays the reverse is true, automatics consistently have more gears to play with, and automatic clutch packs are fantastically fast & good.
Now an efficient automatic is more complicated to design & manufactur, but that's where economies of scale and advancements in engineering tools and manufacturing come into play
In large SUV with powerful engine, modern automatic transmission like ZF 8speed surely have better fuel economy than scenario adequate manual transmission.
Sixt rental cars in France hasn’t been doing manual transmission cars for years - automatics get better gas mileage and are actually better on overall emissions (you’ll notice modern manual cars keep the revs up even when you let off the throttle). Germany has followed, I believe. But you’re right, it’s probably those dumb Americans’ fault.
I think they are referring to rev hang that occurs in newer manual transmissions where the ECU is tuned to not drop revs quickly for emissions reasons. This makes for an annoying 1st-to-2nd gear shift because the driver must wait a long time between shifts before engaging the clutch in order to shift smoothly. Mostly only newer MTs do this - some worse than others.
That's fascinating. I had a manual hire car this summer and I kept getting the 1st - 2nd shift wrong and juddering - I was wondering why I suddenly couldn't shift well (I've exclusively driven manuals for years, so it wasn't as straightforward as being out of practice). I wonder if that was why.
I have an AC in the Netherlands. It’s in the guest room for when our American friends visit and we occasionally all pile in there for the two (non-consecutive) days to weeks of the year it is ridiculously hot.
Eu here: have ac and man tx.
So does everyone i know.
A big difference may be that we turn on the ac only when really necessary, and a manual tx isn't that hard...kids at 16 do it, and have to pass their tests doing it in that, if you take your test in an automatic you are not allowed to drive a manual without being considered a learner again.
> As sad as it may be, manual vehicles make up a miniscule percentage of the current market share.
Is the author talking about the world or the US?
AFAIK the vast majority of vehicles sold in Europe are manual. Not sure about the rest of the world.
I'm from Spain and I've never seen an AT car there. I'm sure they exist though, probably.
I now live in Mexico where AT is very common and I've gotten used to it. I think the best AT is better than the best MT, but I think the average MT is way better than the average AT. I'd be totally happy driving MT.
> AFAIK the vast majority of vehicles sold in Europe are manual.
This was true up until a few years ago, but it's around 50/50 now for passenger cars. There is a definite regional split, with manuals still popular in southern Europe, but having rapidly declining market share in northern Europe. Part of that is that hybrid and electric cars have had more uptake in northern Europe and are almost always automatic (there are a handful of manual hybrids, but they're not common).
Automatics as a percentage of new passenger car sales in 2020 for a few European countries [1]:
Yeah, I do a lot driving in Spain and surrounding countries (Portugal, Italy and France mainly), sometimes with my own car (manual) and sometimes with rentals. I prefer manual but it's getting really hard to even find rentals that are manual. In the few cases they advertise a model as manual, it's a 50/50 chance the car is actually automatic when you come to pick up the model, and when you request to change it to whatever model that has model, they tell you they don't even have any manual cars anymore.
Average MT cars also last a lot longer than AT cars… although with cars these days it’s almost as much about the software experience and interior than long term longevity so the market is really changing.
But certainly it's hard for anyone to realize that when they've been brainwashed for an entire century that they live in the greatest country in the galaxy.
I can read American publications and get mad when they are talking about America without indicating that they are talking about America. It's like me declaring that it's perfectly legal to cross the road wherever you like - unless I qualify that by saying what jurisdiction that refers to, then it's just confusing bad advice for a proportion of people reading who might not actually notice that it is.
I have similar grumbles whenever a publication uses the phrase "in the country", and I have to go and investigate which country they mean.
> I can read American publications and get mad when they are talking about America without indicating that they are talking about America.
They did indicate that by being an American publication. It's not like Spain publications start every article with "Here in Spain, <blah blah blah>." That'd be absurd.
Yeah I might as well quit reading anything written in English online because a bozo says there's only one country in the world we should care about and the rest need to stfu.
Porsche, Ferrari, etc all commanded huge premiums this year for their manual versions. Specifically among younger buyers and first time buyers! You even see this effect downmarket - Toyota promised to never make a manual version of their Supra, then just this last year they put together a cobbled transmission to save their car.
Manuals are also an order of magnitude less complex and cheaper - so automakers will still have some incentive to include them on small budget cars to keep down their base MSRP (even if they don't offer a ton of them). It helps that in most other countries, manuals are still king.
Finally, manual transmissions are overrepresented on the used market. Because manual cars are roughly half as complex as automatics, that translates to many fewer components going bad over time. Less likely to die = cars that stay circulating in the market longer. So if you buy used cars, the options for manuals increases dramatically.
The real issue isn't the demise of manual transmissions. It's the upcoming demise of transmissions entirely as electrification continues it's march towards ubiquity.
You need a lot more mining and environmental destruction to get enough batteries for replacing all cars with electric vehicles. Kind of wondering if maybe one day we could have safe micro reactors that can power vehicles.
A similar amount of mining would be required for the steel, aluminum, and plastic needed to build brand new ICE cars. And ICE cars require constant mining of petroleum just to use the car. The key difference with electric cars is that mining is not necessary to use the car (as long as you charge it with renewable electricity).
The environmental damage from the use phase of ICE vehicles dwarfs the environmental damage from their construction, because use is continuous and ongoing while construction only happens once. Getting rid of the continuous pollution of ICE cars is a major win.
Well given that the current approach is to dump emissions directly into the atmosphere, I'll take the alternative.
Obviously EVs are a suboptimal solution. The real solution to transportation energy use is to switch to walking, biking, and transit as the principle mode of transportation,while switching freight mostly back to rail.
If you could just walk or bike where you wanted to go (ie, land use is good where you live), than these problems become much smaller.
Seems promising. The lead candidate previously for matching cobalt without the cobalt was lithium-vanadium-phosphate, but it has a variable voltage output that makes it difficult to work with.
While that is often true, it isn't always the case. If you are using a lot of gas (driving a lot, high consumption), replacing it with an electric car can very quickly be more environmental friendly. If you are not using a lot of gas, like only driving your car infrequently, keeping your old car running might be better though.
What would very quickly mean? Do you have some data perhaps on the breakpoints regarding this? I'm not dismissive of your statement, just want to see some data.
the amount of metal harvested to achieve ubiquity electrification is nowhere near enough... this march could take quite some time if we don't invent something new fast
> You even see this effect downmarket - Toyota promised to never make a manual version of their Supra, then just this last year they put together a cobbled transmission to save their car.
They didn't say never, just that it was unlikely. I think the new Nissan Z scared them into offering one. The timing was too perfect to be coincidental. From the lead engineer a few years ago:
> Tada said he knows people keep asking for a manual in the Supra and in time, after customers have driven the Supra with the automatic, if they are still clamoring for a manual, he will consider it. "It is not out of the question to see an update like that."[1]
Haha! Fair enough. I remember at the time this was considered bell tolling for manuals. And then a couple years later Toyota is showing up with their tail between their legs.
I had a VW bug in high school that had some kind of short that would constantly drain the battery. I just got in the habit of parking on a small rise, i could put the car in neutral, roll down, pop the clutch and off i went. The fuel gauage also didn't work but i could pop the clutch then hit the brakes and turn off the engine and listen to the gas slosh to get an idea of how much gas i had. Speedometer didn't work either but didn't seem to be much of a problem. heh reverse also didn't work... not much worked on that car. it sure was fun though.
btw my little sister took-it-without-asking/stole it and crashed it when she was 14 :(
I had an E46 330Ci that was just a joy to drive. Those in-line sixes are bulletproof, and the six-speed manual never failed to bring a smile to my face. Great cars, annoying upkeep
Used and vintage Ferrari's have premiums on the manual version if you can find one. They pushed the F1 gearbox hard from its introduction with the 355. Ferrari hasn't even built a car with a manual transmission since 2012, and in the mid 2000s manuals were under 10% of their builds. 599 was the last car they made with a stick, and even that was only 30 of 600 cars.
Porsche was ready to kill their manual with the 991.1 911 GT3 being PDK only, but there was enough outcry they brought it back for 991.2 and 992. The recently unveiled 992 GT3 RS is PDK only since it's a true track car and PDK puts in faster lap times. Even the revived GT 6-speed only accounts for a fraction of their builds and the 7-speed is hardly ordered on the regular 911 at all.
They’re remarkably popular in developing economies, even with their emerging middle classes. The manual model of a typical family sedan is usually at least a couple thousand USD cheaper, which is enough to make manual the most popular option in a lot of places.
That being said I own a 991.1 C2S w/ 7MT and I'm never upgrading bc I don't want a turbo and I'm not into the GT3 anymore as I stopped going to the track
I'm the current owner of one, had it since 2013 from New, I absolutely love it. It's a blast to drive when you want to, it gets 30 mpg when you want to, is reliable, and low cost to insure and repair. I wouldn't trade all those plus' for more speed. I'm still refining my driving, learning to drive better. Like they say, it's more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow.
Huge premiums != large market. It just means the market is bigger than their production.
Manual transmissions are not "an order of magnitude less complex and cheaper." They're far more expensive because the volume is much lower and every configuration has to be crash-tested, so the cost of that crash testing is amortized over a much, much smaller number of vehicles.
Manual transmission vehicles get significantly worse mileage and this drags down the fleet emissions which means they need to spend significantly more pushing out low or zero emission vehicles, or can't produce as many SUVs and trucks, where the profit margins are highest.
Porsche and Ferrari don't represent the market as a whole, or any significant portion of it. Both are acquired to a large degree as investments - they often appreciate in value if well-cared for, or at least lose significantly less value compared to the average vehicle.
People are buying manual transmission vehicles because they're rare and likely to appreciate in value more, not because they're better in any sense. They get worse gas mileage, are slower, and less capable. Dual-clutch gearboxes can shift fast enough that the limitation in them is the rotational inertia of the engine, to the point that there's little or no interruption in delivered torque, thus enabling shifts without upsetting the balance of the car. No manual transmission car can be up/down shifted during track in / cornering / trackout without upsetting the car's balance; dual-clutch gearbox cars can be. And lastly, they can have more gears.
Early gearboxes had longevity issues (clutches) but that's largely been sorted out and is no worse than manual transmission cars.
> No manual transmission car can be up/down shifted during track in / cornering / trackout without upsetting the car's balance; dual-clutch gearbox cars can be.
Speak for yourself, but I don't really have much of an issue shifting while going hot through a corner.
> And lastly, they can have more gears.
Why is this better? Fuel efficiency, sure, but are we going for a Fast and the Furious race scene shifting thing?
> Manual transmissions are not "an order of magnitude less complex and cheaper."
Don't take my word for it. Just look at the size of a manual drivetrain vs an automatic. The increase in steel is directly proportional to the engineering required/number of moving parts.
>Manual transmission vehicles get significantly worse mileage
While it's true that CVTs have finally surpassed manuals for fuel efficiency, I think you are largely overstating the difference. We are taking about 1 to 2 MPG difference.
Dual clutches are certainly faster, but again they are huge and complex things. And not more efficient. Among car enthusiasts, they are becoming about as popular as devices that chew your food for you - technically superior, but who cares?
>Early gearboxes had longevity issues (clutches) but that's largely been sorted out and is no worse than manual transmission cars.
I don't know how someone can take this seriously. A Nissan CVT is not even serviceable - you literally have to swap the entire unit when it goes bad. Which costs more than a used Nissan! Meanwhile a comparable manual will run as long as it's engine.
Again, there's fundamentally half as many moving parts in the drive train. You can't escape the laws of thermodynamics.
What you're missing about the cost is that engineering cost is amortized. If you spend $10m on the engineering for the manual, and $100m on the engineering for the automatic, the manual will be way more expensive if you only sell 10 of them.
> No manual transmission car can be up/down shifted during track in / cornering / trackout without upsetting the car's balance;
That auto-rev matching feature is used in DCT cars for smooth down shifting: almost every manual transmission sports car out there has this exact same technology.
I doubt I'll never buy an automatic transmission vehicle. If that means never buying a new car after some point, then so be it. I've had quite a few manual transmission cars over the years and have driven them through all the things people complain about like steep hills in icy winters, stop and go traffic for an hour or two commute, etc. and I'd still go for a MT every time. Not only is it cheaper and less complex, I thoroughly enjoy driving a manual over an automatic. Every AT I've ever driven (rentals, friend's vehicles, etc.) have just felt boring and in some limited cases, less in control.
I ended up going back to automatic after 3 years of manual. Automatic is more fuel efficient, more convenient, and honestly I can't enjoy urban traffic either way, at least with automatic I don't have to think about it. If I truly want to enjoy a manual I'll do it on the race track.
I have driven both autos and manuals and have noticed a distinct difference in focus when driving the latter. I feel more engaged with the roads and my environment. I also noticed that I've never fought to stay awake while driving a manual, and unfortunately this is the case with automatics.
My previous and current cars are manuals, and I don't ever plan on buying an auto in the future. If my next car has to be a Miata or something, so be it.
I always feel like the fighting to stay awake feeling is a consequence of the road, like a long boring highway. In this case, how is a manual any different than a automatic, being that you are in the highest gear and driving without needing to shift?
I doubt it's changed under real driving conditions, with hills, valleys and overtaking happening frequently, where all types of automatic transmissions perform poorly (they can't possibly anticipate an oncoming hill or overtaking, whereas the driver manually shifts to the correct gear beforehand).
Every automatic car I’ve driven would e.g. quickly downshift when pressing down the accelerator, and while this can be laggy with older AMTs I’d assume it’s not an issue on modern gearboxes, at least the not-super-cheapo ones.
But probably more relevant, all automatics I’ve driven have “manual” shifters (paddles or +/- selector on the gear lever) which let you override the gearbox’s decisions, to an extent.
So nothing precludes anticipating your gearing, even on an automatic.
What you're talking about makes a manual have fewer torque brownouts for lack of a better term, but they'd cost efficiency not gain it. Being in a lower gear before you need it is worse for mpg than being in it slightly "too late"
I’ve been told even the old torque converter style has been upgraded with direct coupling, so you get fluid coupling (and its smoothness) while shifting, and direct coupling (and its efficiency) once in gear.
I think from a purely mechanical point of view, this is the case, meaning that if you have two cars, one with manual gearbox and one with an automatic gearbox, both driving at the same speed with the same gear ratio, the one with the automatic gearbox will likely use slightly more fuel. But even this might not the case at all possible speeds. But at some speeds when the car with the manual gearbox is using the wrong gear, it might use much more gas. The problem with the manual gearbox is not in the gearbox but the human using it. First of all, not all drivers know when is the best moment to change gears and even if they know, they are not always able to change gears at the right moment. When you are turning on a crossing and accelerating, switching gears can be difficult.
Also automatic gearboxes can change gears usually much faster than humans. Operating the clutch is hard and when not done in the correct way, letting the clutch slip too much, waste energy.
Taking this all into account, in many cases, an automatic transmission might be more efficient.
I have been driving cars with manual transmissions all my life. My current car as indicator lights telling you when to change gears up and down. I often find myself skipping gears, especially when accelerating in the city, I often skip fourth gear. The car has six gears and you should already switch to the fifth gear when driving 50Km/h. My first car only had four gears, and the fourth gear was only used when driving over sixty. If a car has more gears it also means that you have to shift more often, which might make driving less efficient in city traffic due to the many more moments you shift slightly at the wrong moment.
The automatic gearbox frequently upshifts in error (for example, just before a hill, making a downshift immediate) and downshifts too late when overtaking, resulting in erratic behaviour, lots of revs, and considerably more fuel consumption.
Taking this into account, in almost all cases cases, a manual transmission might be more efficient.
None of what you describe costs fuel, nor does it cause "lots of revs"? Upshifting "too much" is the opposite, it's fewer revs (and therefore less fuel used, not more)
It’s all in how you drive. I got 50-57 mpg in my old manual. My wife had the same engine in a different car as an automatic. I would only get 20-30 in it. My car was rated for 25-30 mpg. Most people don’t know how to drive a manual transmission for efficiency or never cared to find out, so they drive it like an automatic, which the car isn’t. Thus they end up with less mpg than they would in an automatic.
You have control over the torque, just barely push in the gas when you accelerate and use the gears to keep up with traffic instead of the gas pedal, like on bike.
I'd just like to remind the downvoters that most early 90s compacts put down well over 40mpg with the manual, easily 50+ if you try, and around 30 no matter what you do if equipped with a 3spd auto. Depending on differences in usage patterns and driving style I low 50s vs high 20s is extreme but plausible.
When he was alive, my ol grandpa once told me: "Nobody makes anything for me anymore--they've all just left me behind!" I thought to myself HA! I'll never get like that! I'm always going to be an early adopter, I'll always be optimistic for the new, I believe that technology always marches forward!
Now that I'm getting up there in age, despite swearing otherwise, I'm starting to feel like grandpa. I'm just not the target market anymore, for anything. New cars are boring identical bars of soap with dumb-dumb transmissions. New homes are ugly and made of cheap materials. Computers keep getting more and more locked down and are losing peripheral ports. Everything from appliances to clothing wears out after a few years. Media is made for 5 minute attention spans. Everyone leases and streams things instead of owning them. You can't even buy a lot of software anymore, you have to pay every month. Everything seems to be just getting worse, and only my age cohort seems to notice it. We're turning into those stereotypical cranky old people that we used to ridicule.
The boomers before me were a huge market, and for a long, long time, industry could profitably make things for their taste. Now everything is made for 18-38 year olds who are also a ginormous generation with similar taste. My generation was tiny, and no marketer really ended up caring what we like. I got skipped over, and indeed it's starting to feel like nobody makes anything for me anymore!
> Excuse me Sir, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Saviour, the Framework laptop?
Very gladly: It has even fewer ports than most mainstream laptops. The theoretical flexibility doesn't make up for the facts that it can have at most 4 ports, and the MicroSD reader counts as a port. So you can have one USB-C (which you need for charging), one USB-A to be able to connect a mouse, one HDMI to be able to connect a monitor that doesn't provide USB-C power, and a MicroSD card reader.
So you could in theory swap e.g. the charging port for a MicroSD reader, move all the files and swap again.
In any case I see your point. I always generally scoffed at laptops with less than four USB slots alone and lack of an ethernet port. But I have a 20€ dongle for that now, which is convenient for switching between the work and private laptop.
"The old Model A had a spark advance you could manipulate. I don't know why they got rid of it. Well, that's your Detroit smarties. The hand choke too. That's gone. Been gone." - Charles Portis, The Dog of the South, 1979
As EVs proliferate to work vehicles we'll likely see 2spd and maybe 3spd gearboxes for the same reason trucks have multiple gear ranges. There is a point at which a simple high/low planetary gearset with a simple engagement mechanism has better tradeoffs than an electric motor that can operate happily and reliably throughout the entire torque/speed range you need (which is the same reason your cordless drill has two gears).
Maybe we should just replace the windscreen with a big monitor and have all the controls and knobs just be controller inputs for some racing game so manual fans can pretend to be doing something interesting while their self driving electric car moves them to the office.
Manual is stupid. Automatics have been better than manual for a while and who the hell wants to spend all that time changing gears for no reason. Boring is the silliest rationalization there is.
This article misses mentioning that by far most EVs have no gear changing at all. The Porsche Taycan has 2 gears as did the original Tesla Roadster. Pretty much every other EV has one. So it's not only that manuals have been losing ground to automatics, but automatics have their days numbered as well.
Also grouping dual clutch transmissions like the PDK with regular old torque converter automatics is extremely silly.
But, ... imitation is the new game- the new '24 electric Dodge Charger will supposedly purposely come with gears ... and air baffles. Baffles, to generate 'engine' sounds because speakers are too fake, and gears to make it seem like arriving to the next intersection is a series of arm wrestling steeple chases despite having a steadily controlled torque curve.
To be fair, plenty of internal combustion cars prior to this rising electric era have embraced sound issues and overcompensated. Like the Mustang engine sound passthrough to entertainment system speakers, and the GT-86 / FRS / BRZ engine sound tube passing through the firewall.
The article feels like it's about a decade out of date. These days the issue has largely shifted from manual vs automatic to ICE vs hybrid vs full electric, with the obvious consequences for transmission type.
I always found it strange how people in the UK prefer driving manual transmissions, there's always talk of liking the "feeling" and "control" when driving, this is coming from people who are not enthusiasts and don't even like driving sometimes. 90% of driving tests in the UK are done in manual transmission cars[1]. Taking your driving test in an automatic means that you are not allowed to drive a manual[2].
After living in the US for a few years, I'd never go back to a manual car. I view driving as a chore more than a pleasure and I can't wait for them to be fully self driving.
It definitely seems to be more luxury cars over here that are automatic, and the cars for the everyman seem to still be manual.
Im not from/in the UK or US, but not sure that matters. I also prefer manual transmission. As my car is currently in the shop for repair, I have a borrowed car from the shop, who has automatic transmission instead of manual.
It's true that it takes less effort to drive. Easier to drive by just using one leg and easier to use one arm. But the loss of control is real, at least for me.
One example is moving from zero to non-zero. If I just release the break while standing still, the car slowly accelerates, too slowly. If I gently press the accelerator pedal, same problem. If I press is slightly more, the car accelerates too much. There doesn't seem to be a sweet-spot anywhere for a smooth but fast "takeoff", which is easy to achieve with my manual car.
Another example is highway driving and wanting to accelerate to pass someone. Sometimes the car decides that when I press the accelerator (while driving in 120km/h already), to shift down a gear to be able to speed up faster, but it's completely unnecessary, just go faster instead.
Last pet peeve is reversing. Instead of pressing the accelerator to go backwards, you release the brake pedal. But this again is hard to find a sweetspot and I end up doing stop-slow-stop-slow-stop... and so on, instead of just smoothly backwards without stopping, while being to adjust the speed.
Overall, I can't wait to get back to my car with manual transmission, so I can have a smooth driving experience again.
> Another example is highway driving and wanting to accelerate to pass someone. Sometimes the car decides that when I press the accelerator (while driving in 120km/h already), to shift down a gear to be able to speed up faster, but it's completely unnecessary, just go faster instead.
This is the number one problem I have with automatics!
Even in 'eco' mode, most tend to shift down. It seems completely wrong. It should just be in 'sports' mode that it always kicks down.
And I'm pretty sure I've driven an automatic car that had paddles to drive in manual mode but it STILL shifted down.
I doubt a modern engine has ever failed due to a single instance of lugging. they are pretty robust. but it does put unnecessary stress on the engine. it's similar to cruising on the highway in a low gear. the engine is designed not to fail at 5000 rom, but that doesn't mean it will last as long as if you just drive normally. why risk an early engine failure just to save a few dollars at the pump here and there?
and the point does apply to diesels, the same as it does to any engine with pistons and a crankshaft. it's just that the operating range of a diesel is a bit lower.
In my Land Rover, everything is very smooth with automatic transmission. I can switch to manual mode but it seems so unnecessary as I can hardly make car goes smoother than with default automatic mode.
I think that plenty of power and superb automatic transmission make the difference. Sure for budget cars that lacks power, manual transmission is preferable.
Living in a hilly, mountainous area with an automatic transmission is a nightmare because you're constantly having to 'convince' (jamming the gas pedal a few times) the transmission to get into the right gear to negotiate an incline.
I think this is largely dependent on the car, which is a pro for manual transmission (the consistency and sensitivity when driving). I personally prefer the less sensitive automatics because it's better for fuel economy. In my car, switching to Eco mode helps with this.
Yeah, you might be right. The borrow car is a Audi Q3 which I'm told is supposed to be a "luxury SUV", so I guess I'm falsely assuming the transmission/acceleration should be as smooth as a manual car because of that. I've tried all the different "Drive Select" modes as Audi calls them, where "Comfort" is supposed to make the acceleration/transmission more gentle, but it's a marginal difference compared to "Dynamic" which is supposed to be more aggressive.
I find automatic transmissions absolutely infuriating for all of those exact same reasons.
Except that I drove an auto for all but my first 3 years and last 3 years of driving.
Now I drive a Tesla and the janky auto transmissions and lag in an ICE for the engine to rev is so maddening I actively cringe just trying to drive a rental.
I'm from the UK, there's probably an element of cultural momentum behind it, but I suspect it may also be due to the less flat terrain:
UK roads can be very undulating and windy, for the couple of times I drove someone else's automatic car it always felt like I was waiting for it to figure out the correct gear - some of this is probably historically inferior designs, but the other element is anticipation...
I can see the steep hill suddenly rearing up around the tight bend, I know to drop down in advance to keep the revs high if i don't want to start rolling backwards (or more realistically in todays cars, resulting in just slogging up it) - an automatic transmission can't do that, it has to wait to feel the load just before it's too late, I can also see the top of a hill quickly drop back down so i know exactly the right moment to shift up again - In short, I don't have to guess like the gear box because I can see and know when I'm going to need more or less torque.
You actually see the same problem in new drivers, they don't anticipate or select the right gear so they crawl up hills and their cars speed tends to match the angle of the road, it's a bit like automatics are newbie drivers, they will eventually select the right gear but not before they've lost all their momentum and revs.
I'd guess that the opposite is true for the US (which by comparison looks to be as flat as a pancake) for the very same reason, you don't need to anticipate gears when the terrain ahead is unchanging, once the box can infer you want to go faster and how much faster, making perfect timing for good acceleration is probably better than a human.
Manuals are also quicker to go from a standstill than automatics. All automatics I've driven have a noticeable lag and don't inspire much confidence. This is important because we have a lot of roundabouts and it makes it much easier if you are confident about taking a small gap to get on to the roundabout. It doesn't matter at all with traffic lights which are more prevalent in the US.
Yeah I'd agree with this. Smaller more windy roads, maybe need more control.
I think a lot of it does have to do with historically bad automatics as well, and the fact that doing your test in an automatic locks you into driving them forever.
Regarding hills, I normally drive with cruise control on so if I'm going 50mph, the car will automatically downshift to maintain that speed. You'd be surprised how many people slow down by default when going up hill because they don't try to maintain the speed and you end up zipping past.
I think for most people in Europe it's a matter of cost. Manual cars are cheaper to buy, so that's what people get. When you look at the high-end segment you find mostly automatics. And everyone I know who tried an EV raves about the smooth driving experience, and loves that there's no clutch.
I believe at least part of the reason is highlighted in the article:
> Most of my sense of accomplishment came from navigating the steep curve of learning how to drive a stick shift with my dad at my side—it’s not something you master overnight.
I've noticed, in general, when people have invested significant effort into developing a skill they are reluctant to let it go. This happens a lot in programming too.
Automatic cars were expensive, only posh audis, Mercs and top end "british" cars had them, all the way up till the mid 2000s. they still feel expensive to buy (even though electric cars are all autos now) and there is a fear that they are unreliable and expensive to fix (not sure if that's still the case)
Here in the UK if you only plan to use automatic, you can take an automatic driving license, but you can't drive manuals. So its a bit pointless really. Although one of my mates did it.
Unless I'm going to do track driving, I don't really want a manual (actually if its track I'd rather semi auto)
However, when driving automatic car, I still get the panic "ARGHH CLUTCH OTHERWISE YOU'LL STALL" reflex when I am coming to a halt.
Although you're joking, I just want to say that avoiding needless work isn't laziness, it's efficiency. Maybe those are two sides of the same coin, but I could equally say people in the UK are being needlessly inefficient.
Not just for themselves, but for others - automatics have had better fuel efficiency (less pollution) for years now.
We could even go further and say that needlessly polluting to improve the "feel" of driving is immoral.
Yup this is what I always say. Using modern conveniences doesn't equal laziness. There's a bunch of stuff that cars do for you automatically that you wouldn't call laziness for not doing it yourself: traction control, abs, power steering, using a choke to start the car etc. I lump changing gear into this bucket.
> it’s not something you master overnight. I’m not ashamed to mention that it took me a few sessions in a parking lot to get the fundamentals down
This kind of line always confuses me. I mean, I remember my first driving lesson in the UK. Guy arrived in a BMW 116, manual. He said to me: what is there to explain, you get in and drive. So I got in and drove. Did my first hour, took 5 minutes to get comfortable with the clutch and shifting. Why do the people in the US make it such a big ordeal? Is it like a badge of honour?
It's unlikely it took you five minutes to get the hang of clutch control and shifting gears. OK, it is possible you managed to avoid kangerooing but only for a small range of circumstances.
From rest (with a gear selected and clutch depressed), you have to unlatch the handbrake, whilst at the same time gradually engage the clutch and deploy power via the throttle pedal. You have to ensure you don't go backwards on a hill nor stall the engine and quite a few other factors. You also have to be aware of what is around you and deal with weather etc. That's the simple description with only a few complications. At home we reverse hill start onto a narrow gravel track that runs at 90 degrees from the concrete parking stand - it is quite tricky! More so in a long wheel base Transit.
I drive two manuals - a car and a large van, and one auto - car, at the moment but I've driven most vehicles from 7.5t down, with or without auto.
An auto feels torque from the engine/wheels/conditions and your fuel input. You can floor the pedal to get going and then reduce power gradually as speed is picked up and eventually you know when the auto changes gear and can influence that accordingly - hard to describe.
In a manual you can see what is ahead and take action accordingly. You don't feel the actual torque but you can tell (with experience) from the engine noise and the feeling of acceleration.
It's all about using your array of sensors - eyes, hands, bum etc. and a shed load of experience. You do not learn that in five minutes and autos are not simply stop/start either.
In Switzerland, most instructor cars are Diesels, since they have higher torque and are very hard to stall. Then you go home and drive your parent's petrol engine car and you stall it all the time
This is a really interesting comment for me. I’m a mechanical/aerospace engineer, I size motors by their stall torque all the time, I’ve owned/driven many manual cars over the last 25 years, I’ve done a few clutch jobs in cars, including upgrading a sports car (so I learned about and experienced some of the parameters that make a performant clutch perform). I’ve even had to replace a magnetic clutch on an industrial lathe when I did an automation upgrade on it and it exposed the fact that the clutch was worn beyond its spec - before it was manually operated and the operators just compensated for the wear over time although I forget how. Yet I’ve never put 2+2 together and thought about the torque in a car when starting out and how that relates to how easy/hard it is to stall a particular car.
Huh. That's completely the wrong way round. My instructor's car had a petrol engine that would have been appropriate for a skateboard, so I had to get the clutch just right and learnt properly.
Nonsense. The goal of a driving instructor is to teach how to behave on the road, not how to cajole your car into not giving up on you.
The pupil can do that on their on time, on the first shitbox they acquire. If you want to learn how to start an 037 without stripping the gear feel free to do that.
When I bought a manual about 25 years ago, I had tried out a stick a few times but had never seriously driven one. I definitely wasn't comfortable in anything like 5 minutes. Especially on non-flat roads; for the first month or so I planned my commute a bit around not being in stop and go traffic especially on any hills.
It took me quite a while to really get the hang of driving. I was learning on standard shift. Definitely stalled a lot that first day, and second.
On the other hand, it comes easier to some people. I taught my best friend, and he was better than I within about a minute. I gave him the general instructions on how it works and he stalled twice and then he was fine.
I think that the ease of use curve is entirely dependent on the thing between the shifter and the seat.
I had the same experience with my first manual car. I learned the basics by getting in and driving it.
Like many things if you understand it at a high level then getting the basics down quickly is easy. It's the details that require practice and experience, like starting on a hill.
I guess it depends on the car you started in and how easy it is to stall. My Jeep Cherokee with an inline 6 would have been an incredibly easy car to learn on, but my RX-8 - with about the same amount of low-end torque as a sewing machine - was much less forgiving. If it had been my first manual car, it would have taken ages to feel comfortable.
And to your question, the answer is actually yes. Because fewer folks in the US drive manual cars, the ones that do are often proud of having the skill.
> I guess it depends on the car you started in and how easy it is to stall.
I had similar experiences. I am British also, so, also learned in and mostly drive manuals. My instructor's car would stall if you looked at it funny. A secondhand car I drove after I passed my test would almost never stall at all. I don't remember the makes - I enjoy driving but I'm definitely not into cars that much, sorry. But there's definitely quite a bit of variation in how cars handle and even someone like me who doesn't care that much for the internal details realises they'll need to “figure out" a new manual car when they first drive it.
> I guess it depends on the car you started in and how easy it is to stall.
100% this. My 5-speed Jetta TDi was actually hard to stall w/ all its torque (even at idle). I learned on a 3-cyl. Geo Metro, though, and it was laughably easy to stall.
There are a lot of handed down memories of shifting in non-synchromesh transmissions with lousy cable driven clutches. These are very old memories. Modern manuals do a lot of interesting things like force shifting patterns for efficiency.
If you really want to geek out, do a NASCAR Racing Experience. Those clutches and transmissions are awful in comparison (they’re not supposed to be optimized for feel). They’re mushy, the clutch throw is long and very stiff, and the shifter takes forever to move into gear. The base model economy car stick shift I learned in (‘91 Mazda derived Ford Escort) feels like a luxurious precision instrument in comparison.
> If you really want to geek out, do a NASCAR Racing Experience. Those clutches and transmissions are awful in comparison (they’re not supposed to be optimized for feel). They’re mushy, the clutch throw is long and very stiff, and the shifter takes forever to move into gear. The base model economy car stick shift I learned in (‘91 Mazda derived Ford Escort) feels like a luxurious precision instrument in comparison.
As of 2022 they have the fancy five speed sequential stuff and the clutch is not always necessary.
Yup. The new cars are very fancy compared to what they’ll let you rent for a few hot laps. If/When the new cars show up I plan on doing the driving experience again.
Do you really think your experience is representative and that most people take a few minutes to learn how to drive? Honestly, it even sounds like a humble brag (mostly because I'm a little jealous)
Learning to shift gears while on traffic and without letting the engine die is one of the hardest parts of learning how to drive (together with parking). Granted, I'm a lousy driver, but it's the same for most people I talk to: letting the engine die is the top reason for failing driving tests.
Perhaps it's just Brazilian cars being bad, but I doubt it.
I guess you are just better people across the pond. It took me more like an hour to get used to manual, and weeks before I could do it smoothly 100% of the time.
I learned on a very old non-luxury car and it also took me weeks to get comfortable with it. Either we're just incompetent here or BMWs are easier to drive.
The badge of honor is knowing how to drive a manual in the US. I say this as someone who can drive a manual, but it has become overly nostalgic for some.
Maybe we just have better cars? I kind of had the same experience. Remembering to shift at the right time is one thing (but happily the car starts whining if you forget), but starting to drive is as simple as releasing the clutch and pressing the gas.
How hilly was it where you learned to drive? Starting on a steep incline is the tricky part. If you are on mostly flat roads or have a car with hill assist it becomes much easier.
bmw does shift quite wonderfully. I learnt manual on a Mazda demio though around 1L engine and very predictable shifts gave me all the confidence in driving a manual full time...
Then I got a Honda Integra B16A engine (early 90s) which revved to 8000rpm and the vagueness of shifts meant a successful shift at those rpms was way too much fun for a teenager...
2 years ago, I bought a slightly used Tacoma. I looked for months to find a light pickup truck with a manual transmission. In theory, there were a couple of models from two manufacturers available with a manual, but in reality, I couldn't find one on a lot. In the used market, it was maybe one in fifty. I held out until I found one, because I knew that this would be my last chance to drive a manual, and more than likely the last ICE vehicle I would ever purchase. Just a nostalgia thing, for me. I learned to drive in a 53 Jimmy 3/4 ton pickup with a straight 6 ICE and 4 on the floor transmission, and have never been able to really like automatics, particularly for my farm truck. Electric trucks were not really available or even close to work tested when I needed the new vehicle, so it had to be ICE, and since it was going to my last such vehicle, I just wanted the manual.
And I like it. I'll miss it when it gets replaced by an electric truck, even though the latter will be over all a much better vehicle.
Get a motorcycle. They're still almost exclusively manual. Heck, it's not hard to find one with low miles and in good condition that still has a carburetor as motorcycles didn't switch to to electronic fuel injection en masse until 2010.
Manual transmission, manual choke, manual fuel valve, no traction control, no ABS, no computers (if you get one made before 2010) - what more can you ask for? The ones made prior to 2010 also tend to have analog gauges. It's the ultimate analog riding machine!
Get one of these old machines and have fun. In 10 years or so you won't be able to find fully-manual, non-computerized, motorcycles either.
I found that manual transmissions were good for creating a higher level of engagement in my teen drivers. They literally became more aware and focused on driving and less scary when I made them learn to drive a stick.
Our last stick, a peppy Mazda 3 imported from Canada is the car they all beg to drive when they visit now from college.
I probably own my last manual car, a Scion XA. When I was a teenager, driving stick was fun. It conferred a feeling of skill and exclusiveness, and also a way to drive like a teenager despite an underpowered engine on my way to my cello lesson.
Today, I've paid my dues. I've pushed the lever back and forth, and stepped on the pedal, probably millions of times. It makes me feel like I'm in one of those psychology experiments, where they see how many times a rat will push a button in order to earn a pellet of food.
But also, driving has stopped being fun, due to congestion. Today it's just a chore.
Of course it's a matter of personal preference, I get that. Today, I like everything automatic. Get in, step on the pedal, go. Step on the other pedal, stop. Even better than automatic tranny, is adaptive cruise control. That's like night and day when on the highway.
All of the "smart driving" stuff like adaptive cruise control is why I finally bought my first non-MT car. I guess the manual was more fun (although I had it living in a condo complex with a ludicrously steep driveway -> goodbye clutch :( ), but the amount of ease adaptive cruise control gives me for those long highway drives is well worth it.
To me, this headline comes at least 10 years to late. For two reasons. First of all, even with ICE cars, manual transmissions become more and more rare. Even traditional sports car companies in most models usually rather offer a double-clutch transmission.
But obviously, the end of all gear-shifting is near, as most electric cars only have a fixed transmission ratio, so never shift gears. We really need to switch all new car production to electric, it should be quite apparent why, especially as large parts of the world went through extreme heats again this year.
In Europe, automatic transmission only really got mainstream in the past decade or so. Yes we have had cars that are fully automatic, but that would be more of the high end cards. Most small consumer cars usually was (and still is) manual
Yeah here in Norway new cars sold with automatic went from 32% in 2010 to 96% today[1]. Though I suspect the high ratio of electric cars sold these days, 65% last year[2], has probably been a major contributor.
I know, I am from Germany :) We have still a lot of manual cars, even amongst the newly sold ones. But beyond that we keep doing what we did your decades, manual transmissions are popular in the cheaper car segment. On the other side, all the big, expensive manufacturers more and more move towards automatic transmissions. A BMW-driving colleague keeps complaining how the manual transmissions tend to get worse with each model generation.
But even if Germany kind of misses out on the automatic transmission age a bit - the discussion is moot due to the switch to electric.
> Even traditional sports car companies in most models usually rather offer a double-clutch transmission.
Many are actually back to torque converter automatics, not dual clutch. VAG is about the only dual clutch holdout now. BMW, Mercedes, Ford, Chevy, etc.. are all torque converter automatics, not a dual clutch to be found. Not even on "flagships" like the M3/M4 Competition.
I would pay $25,000 cash for a new manual transmission '00s-style mid-sized pickup with hand-crank windows and knobs for the temperature and radio.
Last time I drove a car from after 2018 it started automatically keeping pace with the car in front of me on the highway, and you couldn't manually close the trunk but instead had to push a button and wait for it to close.
I had to amend my comment to say "new", because you're completely right... the last Tacoma I test drove (automatic) had 290k on it, the transmission slipped during all gear changes, and they weren't taking a dime under $9k. I have no doubt they eventually found a buyer, too.
Same thing is happening in power tools and large appliances. Things used to work, I guess.
I reread after I posted, saw the "new" and was wondering how I'd missed that.
I was also looking at Rangers and Tacomas earlier this year. I've seen pre-2020 model year Tacomas listed for $45k. Surreal to think, "
Hmm that 4 year old, used mid-size pickup is a little pricey, maybe it's better to get something more frugal like a BMW."
Used car prices have been pretty insane recently. I bought a new vehicle to replace my ~13 year old Toyota 4Runner with some very obvious, and not wholly cosmetic, physical damage and got a $15K trade-in for it. I was shocked.
> it started automatically keeping pace with the car in front of me on the highway
I hate how technology is changing the roads. This happens to me so frequently. I am a right lane driver. I hang out, I cruise at 55, and take my time. It feels like every few minutes someone comes up behind me, slows down, and doesn't go around. If I go to the left lane they speed right past me, so I can go back into my right lane... Bizaare!
I'm not sure where you live but what those cars are doing is the correct thing, in regards to laws and driving best practices in what I think are many places in the US. You shouldn't really be going left to get rid of them, even if that's legal where you are (it's not legal to go into the left lane except to pass in multiple states), or you are driving on a highway with three lanes in each direction. The cars should not really be speeding past you on the right either, but if you are weirdly switching lanes they might not have a choice.
Edit: actually, if they are tailgating you too close you might want to try to get rid of them, but tapping your brakes (to flash your rear red lights), or putting your hazard lights on briefly to get them to go around is probably better than going left one lane.
(3 lane, 476 north) What's happening is, they're on auto cruise, they're always a set distance from me (i speed up, they speed up). I go left, they speed up.
I know what they're saying and I've often found it annoying as well.
If such a car is following you and you get to the left or middle lane to overtake a slower car then the car behind you first accelerates to your right as if they were going to pass you, then brakes because of course there's another car there, the one you are overtaking.
The other case where I find them annoying, the worst case for me, is when I'm quietly driving my speed, overtaking a (slow compared to me) car that is following another one. But while I'm overtaking the "auto following" car, the car in front of it gets back to the right lane and the other car suddenly takes off much faster than me. So here I was, driving 110 and overtaking a car driving 90, while suddenly accelerates to 130... until it gets stuck again a kilometer further, and I have to overtake it again, and everything repeats.
Of course, I could do the same acceleration/braking dance and stay behind them all the time, but I care about not spending fuel for useless speed changes.
> * I would pay $25,000 cash for a new manual transmission '00s-style mid-sized pickup with hand-crank windows and knobs for the temperature and radio.*
Sounds like a Dacia Duster Pick-Up. It's 22 000€ or so (new).
I'm with you. When I bought my car in 2009, there were only 3 of the model (any color) with manual transmission and manual windows/locks in the entire state (California). Drove almost 200mi each way to buy that car.
Manuals are disappearing in the "small" trucks sold today. You need to go with 4x4 to get a manual in Toyota. And, Nissan dumped theirs completely.
Jeep Wranglers still offered hand crank windows and a manual transmission until very recently. I think the hand crank windows are now gone, but the MT survived for at least one more generation.
If I could afford a Porsche I would still get a manual option. Changing gears cleanly, heel-toe blipping the throttle when gearing down, getting the right gear at the right time - simple pleasures. It seems the more refined cars become the less character they have. Even the equivalent cars to my old dependable friend feel like lesser cars. Annoy CVTs, electric power steering, and finishes that feel cheap. And windows - I have nice big windows where I can see everywhere.
Dual clutch in more expensive (fast) Porsche's are a lot more fun bc you have less to worry/freak out about going at speed (I'm not that good of a driver...).
In cheap Porsches like the Boxster the manual is a ton more fun, since those cars don't really go very fast, so you feel more engaged. But Porsche manuals are kind of janky and notchy in those.
Maybe I'm just reminiscing "good ole times" but the manual in my S2000 was and is still the best manual I've ever driven.
Can't you use the clutch and foot brake smoothly enough to take off on a hill? Even a slippery one? Hand in your manual transmission driver's licence!
[Tidbit: where I live drivers are issued with different licences for manual and automatic cars. You have to pass the test in a manual car for that licence, otherwise you can only drive automatic cars.]
My 1987-ish Subaru RX Turbo had a hill-holder manual, and I think the company had been making them for a number of years even before that. Major confidence boost for a high school kid living in the hills, and learning to drive in that fragile, overly complicated used car he could barely afford to insure let alone wreck.
I've burned my clutch so much doing that, now I put the 4x4 into "granny" low, and just quickly move from brake to gas and drop the clutch. It rolls back only a couple inches. But I really should put more effort into the heel-toe.
I used to drive a manual 5L Mustang in the depth of the Edmonton winter. There was definitely one hill going into the city where if the traffic stopped (due to there being a pedestrian crossing right at the top for some reason) it was definitely time to start praying to the old gods and the new.
One time, after a particularly snowy night I drove into downtown and after making a right turn the car had its belly get stuck on a bunch of snow. But, indeed having a manual transmission did save me there as I switched into 3rd and got the car out that way after a couple tries.
Please don’t take this as an insult but I’m originally from Edmonton and complaining pedestrians as if pedestrians and not traffic is what causes traffic, as you drive your 5.0 into Edmonton from presumably the suburbs, is the most Edmontonian thing I’ve heard in a while. And then you one-upped yourself because bragging about driving in the snow is the third most popular past-time in Edmonton (after making fun of Toronto for not having 500 snowplows at the ready for a once in 10 year snow storm and making fun of Vancouverites for not being able to drive in snow even though they have to drive on ice/hills and not on snow/flat).
My particular complaint about that hill and the pedestrian crossing is that it’s right at the edge, where as moving it back a couple of feet would give cars from down below a buffer. Oh and the real cause of traffic on that hill was the endless construction. But I’m sure you know that trope too lol
But anyway, I’m now in the Bay Area and my third most popular past time now is making fun of people suddenly and violently forgetting how to drive the moment there is a single drop of water falling from the sky.
I had a Saab 900 Turbo with manual. There was a fairly steep hill coated with wet ice. I was able to feather my way up the hill without too much drama. Unstudded snow tires. It did have the benefit of having 60% of the weight over the drive wheels.
What a great car that was. Complete beast in the winter.
I've driven a manual for many years, and I never got this complaint. I always found it perfectly straightforward to get moving on a steep uphill with just a little clutch control. Maybe you roll backwards a few inches if you're a little slow, but so what? Despite appearances, you're never actually that close to anything.
I take it you live somewhere with ample parking lots? I definitely don't miss the dance of clutch, handbrake, and gas whilst trying to parallel park in a spot I would barely fit into on a hill.
I think you missed the part where the hill is covered with snow and/or ice, and there's another car directly on your tail, because the majority automatic drivers aren't expecting rollback.
> Higher gears require fewer revs on the highway, leading to improved gas mileage.
He seems to be suffering from the common misunderstanding that higher revs = higher fuel consumption. Those extra gears aren't at the top end to reduce torque at high speed (what?), they're spread more uniformly to keep the engine operating in an efficient or powerful region.
Resistance in the engine isn't a major source of power loss. RPM should be whatever is optimal for the power output. You don't reduce highway fuel consumption more and more by using a higher and higher gear because then the engine is running below its optimal rpm for efficiency.
A question tho. A manual transmission makes engine braking possible. But I never quite understood whether engine braking actually does suck a lot more gas thru the carb. In other words, when your foot is off the gas but there is high airflow thru the carb, does it draw gas ?
For cars with carburetors, yes it does use a little fuel because some air will get sucked into the engine. Fuel injected cars use none because they simply don't activate the injectors if you're not pressing the gas pedal.
They're more fun to drive if you're driving for fun, but most people aren't and commuting in heavy traffic in a manual transmission car sucks. I am sure manuals will live on for a relatively small group of hobbyists, but there's not a lot of reason for the vast majority of drivers to use them.
> They're more fun to drive if you're driving for fun
I've always preferred a good CVT when it comes to fun. There's nothing like being snapped from 0-100 with no pause in the action. And the scream of a hydrostatic on a 30,000 pound combine is a treat. Manuals might be more fun than your average slush box, but in the grand scheme of things...
There’s a bunch of EV kits appearing for classic vehicles.
It’s looking like if you want an electric vehicle without non of the other nonsense that comes with new vehicles the conversion kits will be the way to go.
> It’s looking like if you want an electric vehicle without non of the other nonsense that comes with new vehicles the conversion kits will be the way to go.
I'm unconvinced.
Surely Mazda will be electrifying their fleet and the MX-5 isn't going to vanish and it's never going to become some non-drivers' roadster. Lotus has to eventually followup the Elise with something electric, that too likely won't be some autonomous trash with deprecated steering wheel+pedals.
Then there's the budget Chinese EVs the world markets seem poised (desperate?) to become flooded with. Don't you think there'll be myriad basic, mostly-manual EVs in there? I half expect some cheap Chinese RWD EV econoboxes to become favorites for hot-rodding gearheads to upgrade the motors and batteries in. Hot-rodding should be entering a new emissions-free era, sounds great.
I love stick-shift. I have never owned anything else in 52 years.
I once drove my brand-new Mazda B3000 4WD to another city, on Christmas Eve. The dealer had helpfully washed my new truck before I drove it away. Some water had seeped and my starter was frozen solid. Fortunately a couple of hearty passers-by pushed it so I could kick-start it. If it had been an automatic, I would have spent Christmas hundreds of kilometers from home & family.
Manuals are MUCH MUCH more common in other countries. I was just in the UK, and (because I'm curious) I peaked in cars in every lot we parked in. Manuals were the dominant mode there, in my unscientific sampling.
Same here in Sweden. Automatics are almost a curiosity, some silly crutch used in strange countries where people don't know how to drive or something.
But in a sense manual transmission is still dying. EV's don't have a transmission in the same sense, and from a user's perspective they're similar to automatic transmission. Well, "dying" might be a bit premature, but declining anyways!
US centric article, of course, when it comes to the scale implied ("end of" and "near"). Haven't seen any significant (intent to) move in that direction, in Europe, for example.
I don’t see how it’s any different for EU long term, even if they haven’t caught up to the US/other markets yet. Automatic ICE vehicles are more fuel efficient, since they can have significantly more gears. And electric cars (usually) only have 1 gear, completely getting rid of the need for any gear shifting at all. The combination of electrification and the continual march to higher efficiency and more performant powertrains naturally leads to a reduction in manuals, looking 10-15 years out.
["end of" + "near"] != "long term".
Long term I'd see Europeans moving away from cars, as much as possible. €4k incentive in France to get rid of your car and get electrical bikes, and a public transportation of the kind that the US can't even dream (inside cities trams and buses + high speed trains + inter-cities and inter-countries buses - all at least in Europe and neighborhood (where car could be a term of comparison)), are much more impactful than the stick shift obsolescence.
This company (and the founder) are just a bunch of mechanical geniuses. Other than in pure-electric, where they partnered with Rimac, they have driven so much innovation, especially with ICE: form-factors, alternatives to camshafts (free-valve), even drive-mechanisms, manufacturing techniques, wheels etc.
They're extremely humble and low-key about their inventions too, though they come out of seemingly nowhere, I don't think, for example, that anybody expected this latest innovation, because the consensus has been "manual is dead" since the new sports cars like Porsche, Ford Mustang and various others are ditching it for pure performance reasons (0-60 times).
The new manual looks amazing with its gated shifter, very Pagani Huayra-like. Their whole youtube channel (especially the invention videos, which are very humble for the sheer audacity of what they achieve) is interesting, but here's the link to the manual-automatic video.
eh for cars maybe, but an automatic test for your commercial drivers license to operate a tractor trailer comes with some pretty severe restrictions. they're nice for day drivers like the beer trucks and FedEx mules but regional and over the road/interstate drivers can't upgrade to tankers or low boy trailers in most states unless they can jockey a stick.
auto boxes on semi trucks also do some squirrley things on long hills and descents where control is pretty darn important.
I got my CDL in 1990 on a Silver Eagle tour bus. I was already comfortable with manual transmissions, but the double clutching blew my mind. It was a whole other level of understanding what all had to happen to transfer power.
I picture this is, and will continue to, change with the passing of time. DCT and CVT will likely come for semi trucks as they came for motorcycles and cars.
Shifting is completely normal to me, almost like muscle memory. I know my car well enough that can match motor revs to the new gear pretty close, without having to look at the dials. The whole process is automatic - I no longer even notice doing it. I just shift when needed, without actually having to consciously think about anything...
That being said, I don't really feel nostalgic or emotionally attached to that experience. I'm not used to automatics, but I know that in an automatic car that gives you good feedback, you can still develop that same "intuition", allowing you to for example kick-down in a lower gear for overtaking.
For me personally, loosing manual transmissions is no cause for concern.
I am concerned about people becoming worse drivers, and roads becoming more dangerous, but I think that other trends contribute more to that than automatic transmissions do. Like modern SUVs providing super little feedback. You can't feel the road, you can't feel the motor, you can't feel your speed, or the cornering forces, or how much grip you have. The whole driving is experience feels floaty and detached - like playing a video game.
> That being said, I don't really feel nostalgic or emotionally attached to that experience.
There's a ton of things you can do with a manual when pushing a car to its limits that simply aren't possible with an automatic, especially when on slippery terrain (mud, snow).
You're not getting the point: there are situations where you will find yourself on difficult terrain and your automatic gearbox will get in the way of getting back to safety.
I’ve dailied a mt in LA traffic since 2009. I’m one of those connected to the car people. I don’t even like cruise control bc I can’t feel what is happening.
That said, I will never buy another ice engine if I can help it. That’s coming for all of us ”enthusiasts”. For better or worse “boring” electric motors with all the smoothness and infinite torque across all rpm’s are the future…
Mt and even ice will be only for the affluent as a recreation item. (See who currently can own a horse and what they use them for as an example)
So what are the enthusiast masses to do?
My pitch is that electric sports cars of the future should have digital simulations of the mt experience. We just need to modulate the electric motors to simulate the torque curve of an ice engine.
Either put a real clutch and mt gear box in and pump the output into that. Or fake the whole thing with a haptic clutch pedal.
Sim racing has just about all the tech figured out for how to make it believable enough. And we already pipe fake engine sound around ice cars to make em sound better.
The best part is that you could simulate different types of engines and new and fun combinations of manual and auto stuff. And when you want efficiency just plonk it in the middle gear and let the electric motors be electric mode. You get all the options. Full manual, sequential shifter, paddles dual clutch, and full auto electric.
Maybe that would be better in electric retrofits but if Mazda made an electric Miata with that option the haters would hate until they tried it and saw how fun it would be. Really that’s the only reason anyone has to get a mt anymore. They are just fun as hell to drive so all we need to do is figure out how to make the electric cars we will all have to drive fun.
That's never going to happen en masse because petrolheads are always going to complain "But it's not the real thing and you're a stupid person for enjoying it!!!"
Yeah but people said the same thing about 4 cylinder turbo cars vs beefy v6s, but they made em anyway, they are super fun and people who want to drive a fun car but don’t have tons of cash bought tons of them.
This isn’t the solution for the purists with cash to spend 10-20$/gallon of gas it’s the thing for the rest of us who love to drive but cant justify an ice.
I mean I think you are right in that it’ll never happen. It would be a lot of engineering for a super small segment of the market, but I can dream…
Manual transmission fetishism is perplexing to me. I’ve owned two manual transmission cars… an old Hyundai Elantra and an even older Toyota pickup. I can’t think of a single reason I would not rather have the automatic version of either.
I also presume manual transmissions will continue to be available to the enthusiasts and professionals/sportspeople who have an actual reason to desire them.
Back when mustangs used gasoline and were sports cars, I compared a V6 (non-turbo) manual with a V8 automatic. The V6 was much more fun to drive and got better fuel economy.
My tiny ultra-efficient EV blows them both out of the water on mountain roads though.
There's one exception: the RWD EV's front end likes to skid while decelerating into turns. I prefer the Mustang's habit of breaking the rear end loose while accelerating out of turns.
There's definitely a difference in transmissions. I learned stick on a generic crappy car, but I once drove a nicer, more expensive car with a manual, and it was quite pleasant. Shifting gears was so much smoother than what I was accustomed to.
Honestly, my manual 97 Civic was so much more fun to drive than my current car (a Prius V).
I'm on board with it being a hybrid (though it actually gets roughly the same fuel economy on the highway) and especially happy with gas prices what they are now. But I don't think you need a sporty car to appreciate the torque you generate in a manual
How old? Back in the 90s and before, manual transmissions were clearly far superior to automatics. They had more gears, they were far more reliable (automatics routinely broke down), and they had significantly better fuel economy. The only reason to drive an automatic was sheer laziness.
Fast-forward to today, and it's all changed. Automatics have at least as many gears, they're more reliable (they don't need the clutch changed every 100-200k), and they have significantly better fuel economy. The only reason to drive a manual now is basically nostalgia.
Where I live (where manuals are the "default") it seems like automatics are the fetishistic option. There's lots of hills, winding country roads etc round here, an automatic is a bloody nightmare because it doesn't "know" I'm approaching a hill, time to drop to a lower gear just here, I'm approaching the top of a hill, change up now, I'm overtaking on a road, I need high acceleration now. It completely fails at knowing all this and is less efficient as a result.
This is why I am sceptical of all the "automatics are more efficient these days" line. Maybe there's some volkswagen style dodgy tests that show that driving under predictable conditions on a motorway it is more efficient, but as automatics can't know upcoming conditions on the road or intentions I doubt they are more efficient in the real world. At least not round here.
I've owned a dozen+ manual transmissions and the one in my Hyundai Elantra is by far the worst I have ever used. It's incredible "notchy" and prevents you from shifting between gears quickly (I assume intentionally for fuel economy/longevity reasons). You couldn't pick a worse example to compare against.
> Manual transmission fetishism is perplexing to me. I’ve owned two manual transmission cars… an old Hyundai Elantra and an even older Toyota pickup. I can’t think of a single reason I would not rather have the automatic version of either.
To which I say: it’s because you haven’t had a fun manual car. BMW 325i and Porsche 964 were both fun in manual.
> I’m also pretty positive if you wanted to buy a brand new Porsche or BMW you could pay for a manual version.
No, actually it doesn’t work like this anymore for most new models.
I learned driving on manual, and drove manual cars for many years. Changing gears, operating the clutch is second nature to me. I don't have to think about it, whether I'm driving on the highway, or in city traffic or on a steep hill.
Recently started driving a CVT, been about a couple months. I absolutely love the experience. It's so much more relaxed. The movement of the car is always smooth, I can hardly hear any changes in engine speed. I can accelerate from 20 km/h to 80 km/h and the RPM stays constant around 1100.
Hill driving is amazing, the car knows to shift down when going uphill. It knows to apply engine braking when going downhill.
City driving is effortless. Put it in drive, and it's literally just a matter of using the brake and accelerator. It even disengages the transmission completely when you come to a complete stop and stay there for a few seconds.
I have shift pedals on the steering, but I never felt the need to use them!
I remember an automatic version of my second car would have cost 12k instead of 10.
Why is this 20% increase in price not being discussed here?
I suppose this was partly because the cheapest automatic version had more HP than then cheapest manual version, and partly because automatic is just more expensive. But the point stands...
Honestly, I don't understand why manufacturers are spending any money at all designing new ICE power trains. I can sort of see the argument for hybrids, but charging networks will make them obsolete very soon.
On the other hand, I also expect politicians to pull in the 2035 mandatory phase outs of gas vehicles.
> I can sort of see the argument for hybrids, but charging networks will make them obsolete very soon.
Eh, I don't know about that. The current-gen Prius can easily get over 600 miles on a tank of gas if you aren't a lead foot. And a refill takes 5 minutes. For longer trips, that still makes quite a difference.
I suppose some people can cope with sustained 10 hour drives broken up with five minute bio breaks, but I cannot.
Also, unlike with gasoiline, you don't need to supervise an EV while it charges. Stopping for 30 minutes (bathroom breaks included in that time) every 5 hours doesn't seem too onerous to me.
How fast are you driving that a 30 minute charge (even at a level 3 charger) gets you sufficient range for 5 hours of driving? It should be closer to an hour of charging I'd think, if you are driving at highway speeds.
By 2030, I expect the number of EV produced to exceed the number of ICE vehicles. EV doesn't need a gearbox, which makes the discussion about manual vs automatic transmission moot.
In terms of vehicle external design, modern vehicles are designed for pedestrian and passenger safety, and that emphasis pushes towards a consensus design of the jelly bean look. EVs with their "frunk" will further evolve that design as it means that there isn't a honking great lump of steel in the front of the car.
As for the driver UI/UX, touch screens for controls that the driver needs to operate while driving are a definite negative. I expect that there will be studies by the various standards bodies regarding this that will require movement back to haptic feedback requirements in the design rules.
>> modern vehicles are designed for pedestrian and passenger safety
Passenger sure, but pedestrian? I’m not so sure. Maybe this is an American thing only but cars continue to get larger and larger, which is great for passenger safety, but decidedly less great for pedestrians.
Adding to the list of places where manual transmissions are still common - I still see them in a lot of Japanese kei trucks[1]. These are super minimalist trucks used for agricultural and other jobs that cost less than $7,500. Upgrading to a CVT transmission adds an extra $500 or so to the price - which seems worth it to me - but when you consider that a lot of the work these are used for is low-margin to begin with, I can understand why people want to keep costs down.
I think manual transmissions are increasing in popularity though as a lot of farmers are aging, and lose confidence in their ability to operate a manual transmission.
Those are also very popular in Taiwan. They are essentially the pickup trucks equivalent. The nickname for these cars is “Make A Fortune Car” (or make money car).
I recently had to go back to a manual shift Mercedes car after 2 decades of driving very fine automatic BMW gearboxes. While the transmision is very nice for a manual compared to those from the old days, the overwhelming feeling was ... why? This process has been automated and optimized to the point where the computer can gear switch better than the best drivers on a daily commute. Why do some people still insist on manuals?
Anecdotally, nearly 100% of the 'Í do not like automatic tramsmission' people that I know are woman, all of an age between 45 and 55. Somehow they still take pride in riding stick, while the rest of the world has moved on from being Mantafahrers.
I hope not, I genuinely enjoy driving, I love the feel of shifting gears in my Type R. Plus, in a lot of cars, Type R's are a good example, they have a really high red line, you can squeeze a lot of revs out of the engine. But the gear indicator tells me to shift up at around 3000rpm. Which is more fuel efficient, for sure, but where's the fun in that? I want the option to drive like a lunatic from time to time and get the most out of the engine. I've never driven an automatic, so maybe that's still possible somehow. But I love the interaction with the engine you get from a manual.
My current cars are 24, 22, and 20 years old. After reading through all the comments on here, I think I’ll keep driving them till I die. No touchscreens, lots of manual knobs, no way for them to be remote accessed, etc.
Also to be noted is the popularity of the AMT systems or the Automated Manual Transmission, where a manual gear box is mated with a computer which shifts gears for you. As of now Auto-enthusiasts look down upon these systems, but they have improved a lot in recent years, and seems mechanically much more reliable systems than CVTs and DCTs which have a lot more moving parts. Also with improvement in software they could become better over time. They seem cheaper also.
My first car was a very old and rusty Fiat Uno. The car wasn't particularly safe but it was made remarkably more dangerous with my teenager stupidity and lack of restraint.
My point is that manual transmissions actually made a lot of sense in cars without ABS and drum brakes. Learning to brake with a gearbox was a life saving skill with those cars.
Nowadays none of this applies with ABS and ESP/ESC and indeed MT is likely to become a relic, specially with the rollout of EVs.
Manual transmissions unfortunately seem like, as they die off, are being relegated to shitbox cars or (mostly high end) sports cars.
That said, if you can find them, there are still some modern-ish BMWs that aren't M-series that come in manual. I picked up a 2016 340i and modded in CarPlay, and it feels like the best of the old world and modern world - rides the line perfectly for me. Will be sad when I finally have to let it go.
> As sad as it may be, manual vehicles make up a minuscule percentage of the current market share.
In the US. In France the share of automatic gearbox for new cars passed 50% for new cars only in 2021, and there are still an immense majority of manual vehicles in circulation; you have to use a manual gearbox to pass your driving license.
This will change with electric cars that for the most part don't need gears at all, of course.
> You may ask why an electric race car needs a transmission in the first place? Using a gearbox helps you to extract the maximum efficiency possible from the electric motor. High Performance electric motor efficiency varies greatly depending on its architecture and design philosophy. Some motors are high revving – perhaps as high as 25,000rpm, while others only reach 9,000rpm. They will be delivering very different torque bands; using a transmission helps you keep the motor in the most efficient operating range possible.
> There’s another fundamental reason why Formula E cars use a transmission: because the rules say so. The regulations stipulate that the motor must deliver drive to both wheels through a single mechanical transmission, so you need at least one gear set to accomplish this final drive. The electric motors used in Formula E have some of the highest power-to-weight ratio of any automotive motor in the world so that transmission has its work cut out for it.
The EV curve is not exactly flat, so it's worth it for Formula E to bother with a transmission. For consumer cars the extra tiny efficiency boost doesn't matter.
No idea what the text of the article says, but based on the figures, it goes into more detail than me.
To me a manual is all about engine braking. You just have to use the brake pedal less. I haven't driven an electric vehicle before, but I imagine they could deliver a similar experience if the regeneration was suitably programmed? Can an EV driver comment on whether they offer a similar engine braking experience to a manual?
Most EVs have one pedal mode: lift your foot off the accelerator and the car rapidly decelerates to a stop using regenerative breaking.
My BMW has a neat adaptive driving mode: because the motors don’t use permanent magnets, lifting off would normally result in coasting. When adaptive driving is on, the car uses its radar to figure out how much regeneration (and if necessary friction) braking to apply so you stop just short of the car in front of you, all without applying the brake. The same system is also used to dampen acceleration when there are cars in front of you. It sounds like madness, and is very strange the first few times you use it, but ends up making driving more pleasant.
As you guessed, EVs primarily use regeneration to brake. Most newer EV models give you a "blended" brake pedal where it will use regen exclusively if you brake softly but it will also apply the traditional wheel brakes if you brake hard.
Once you get used to the idea of regen it's weird to think that traditional combustion cars just throw away all that energy as heat in the brakes and/or engine.
Aren't all hybrids and EVs doing regenerative breaking when you are pressing on the breaking pedal?
To answer your question, Tesla by default starts breaking a little bit when you take your foot off the accelerator pedal, as if you were driving in a slightly lower gear. This behavior is configurable in settings.
If you read the article is says that dual clutch automatics are much faster than manual transmission and most modern automatics have 7 to 10 gears for better fuel efficiency but no one is willing to use a manual transmission with that many gears.
I believe every US market Nissan sedan, including the stanza at the lowest end, come standard with a continuously variable transmission programmed to fake the sensation of shifting at fixed gear intervals. so in that case, you get an infinity of 'gears'
I'd take the manufacturer's efficiency claims with a grain of salt; they are not going to be individually reproducible, let alone comparable to each other for those models. You can drive a manual for fuel efficiency, and be assiduous in doing so; there is intent and skill involved.
Trucks don't have 18 gears for efficiency. They have 18 gears because low-revving diesel engines have small power bands; mix that with heavy loads, and it pretty much necessitates having a lot of short, closely-spaced gear ratios, so that maximum torque can be achieved consistently, no matter what speed you're at.
Also, FWIW, they don't just pick between 18 gears with a single shifter. They have multiple inputs that allow shifting between multiple combinations of gears, some requiring clutch to change and some not, as they gain speed. Most trucks still only have 6-ish positions for the main gear shifter to slot in to.
I'm sure they would love one, but it's probably not that easy/cheap to find one that can handle that much torque with such heavy loads. The biggest/heaviest trucks just end up using electric/traction motors running from diesel generators, so they don't need a transmission at all.
Most modern automatic transmissions let you pick a gear if you really want to, either with paddle shifters on the wheel or a sideways +/- slot next to "D" on the gear lever.
You don't get the sensation of letting the clutch go at juuust the right revs, but hey, there are always motorcycles.
Whenever I try that it seems to overrule my shifts. Can’t go to first gear above a certain speed. Stay in a low gear too long and we’ll go ahead and upshift anyway.
Not really. They’ve been available for ages now but not much uptake. This happens periodically - there was an automatic Honda back in the 80s that also didn’t sell.
WHat has changed, at least in performance bikes (broadly stated) is autoblippers/quickshifters. A skill you could learn (clutch less shifts) of course but never as fast as these.
The Honda Super Cub was pretty cool, and it dates back to the late '50s. Apocryphally, it used a centrifugal clutch to free the left hand so the rider could hold a package while driving.
The related context is that automatics can’t predict what gear you’re going to need before you need it. This leads to a lag that doesn’t exist with manuals that automatics compensate for by having oversized and overpowered engines.
This is most noticeable when overtaking or driving on twisty mountain roads. One way people work around it is by tapping the brakes as a signal to the transmission to shift down.
Another way to notice this weird behavior with automatics is to see how much noise american cars make when trying to take off fast from a stop light. Lots of noise thanks to wide open throttle, not much acceleration because the (cheap) gearbox keeps shifting up and reducing torque.
We've slowed nearly to a stop for the roundabout, entered it when it was clear, and now need to put on some speed to get going again at the speed of the other traffic.
The transmission will simply be gone due to electric motors won't it?
And even with gas engines, I'm in Europe and I've never owned an automatic. I've driven a few and kinda hated them... with the exception of Toyota's CVT. I would drive that.
Too bad hybrids have 18/24 months delivery time around here. Not a good time to change your car.
I finally had to switch to a slushbox for family reasons. Driving is less fun, but it gets the job done. One thing that's neat though, that a stickshift can never do, is automatic engine braking.
Driving along on cruise control, if a long downhill is encountered, the car will shift down to engine brake. That's cool.
In a couple decade gasoline cars wont really be a thing. Everyone will drive EVs. If it's smart to burn gasoline to generate power, they powers that be will build large plants to far more efficiently burn the gasoline.
Tesla didn't get a transmission mainly because they put enough power and low end torque would blow up any transmission that hit weight and size specs they needed to do.
However, a manual trans can be in an EV. It just doesnt make sense, there's virtually no situations where you want to be out of gear.
Flipside, this is a huge adoption hurdle for me. I need my manual trans.
Not as long as government owned car manufacturers have access to exclusive national wide markets and can sell simple automatic transmission systems for 10 to 15% of the car price while selling the car 500 to 1000% higher than their competitive price (situation in my current country)
I drove manual for 22 years. Bought my first auto this year and I'm never going back. seriously. I thought I knew better than the car when to change gears since I've seen some pretty bad auto, but the latest versions are just great.
I love driving manuals, learned on an 5 speed New Beetle and mostly drive a 2012 Mazda 6 now. My partner has a newer automatic Mazda 3 and it just feels wrong to have the car guess what I want lagging behind me rather than me just telling the car directly ahead of when I need it.
The only argument that's swayed me away from being entirely on the side of manual cars is that if I'm out hiking with friends who I've driven to the trail and who can't drive my car and I get hurt in a way that prevents me from driving then we could end up stranded. The next car I buy will likely be electric so it ends up not mattering anyways.
When ICE vehicles are banned, I'll just do an EV conversion. Keep the whole standard drivetrain with manual, pop out the engine, pop on an EV motor and battery pack. I don't plan to ever own an automatic car, or gearless.
I used to love manual transmissions - almost all cars I owed had one, but only until I first experienced driving a Tesla. Now that I had been driving EVs I like the user experience and feel of control of the car more.
'95 Toyota Tercel 5-speed, around 101,000 miles (I got it in 1998 with around 52,000). Only city driving (though traffic here is not that heavy), and I get around 28 - 30 mpg. The car handles very well; very responsive steering, and the engine actually feels a little overpowered for a car of its size. I put more money into the car than it's worth, but in terms of how it feels to drive it's the best car I've ever owned. I'll be very sad when it's no longer fixable - I think rust in some area will probably get it.
I'm using my high point's account for this: in 2016, 2 years after my Stage IV Colon Cancer dx and continuing treatment I (Silicon Valley fat engineer) bought a 2005 BMW 325 manual Convertible much to the dismay of my wife.
Let me tell you - there is NOTHING like driving Highway 9 up to Skyline through Saratoga after chemotherapy. The manual transmission maybe mattered less than the convertible aspect (fresh air is what kept my nausea away) but the physical connection to the mechanism made me feel alive.
The car basically fell apart within a few years - but I don't regret the $8k it cost me.
From personal experience, the new automatics are better than manuals.
I found going from a 5 speed to a 6 speed annoying -- it added a lot more shifts. After 26 years of driving a manual, my car got totaled and I pretty much had to get one with an automatic.
The new car has hill descent mode, which is pretty similar to what a manual does, and it has some more sophisticated limited slip traction control modes, which eliminates the only other real advantage of a manual.
The only remaining advantage of a manual now is cost, which matters far more in developing countries than in the USA.
I think I'd take an automatic if it gave me significantly more on-the-fly control over the behavior of the gearbox. Sure, day-to-day, I want to be driving at maximum fuel economy on city streets and relatively slow highways, but other times I'm taking my car out for a spin in the mountains where I want to maximize my power output by spinning up to 7500 revs, engine break to take hairpin turns at speed, and other irresponsible fun.
All the automatics I've driven in seem to at best have a "best fuel economy" mode, a "sport" mode that doesn't even get close to pushing the engine to red-line, and an up-down shifter that lags too much for a downhill-into-a-tight outside-turn-into-an-uphill type scenario.
I hope that someday there will be an option for an electric car with a manual transmission. Regardless of how small the market would be and how little practical sense it would make
It'd be fairly weird though since the electrics don't idle. Starting off would be easy: just put it in gear and then accelerate without ever having to slip the clutch or even know about the clutch "bite" point. Be a bit like using a traditional starter motor with a manual already in gear and the clutch engaged.
My understanding is that gearboxes trade torque for rotational speed, and electric motors have plenty of the later but with less torque than exploding hydrocarbons to push pistons. So my guess is that in addition to be unnecessary (electric motors can do a lot of rpm with constant torque), it might be really hard to make a manual transmission electric car drive well with more than a couple gears. And switching between them wouldn’t be anything like the experience of an ICE car.
Some years ago, my father in law added an electric engine to an old manual Chrysler from the 70s I think. I drove it once and it used gears and clutch. It was a good experience except for the fact that the car was super old!
I like driving manual and I like my EV. But I don't want a manual in my EV. Just give me an EV without all the traction control smarts. Give me access to the raw power so I can control how and when it slips.
I have a manual (2018), I'd buy an electric for the acceleration but they need to make it a $30k autocross car. Don't mind if it's a death trap, just fast and cheap.
As gas cars are headed to deprecation in California with others likely to follow, EV designers are creating manual transmission designs. Currently only a couple of $100K+ models (Porsche and Audi) have it. Toyota and Jeep are working on more.
They're really just mislabeling it for nostalgia and marketing.
It's actually just a control to increase torque more aggressively on command for increased acceleration beyond what is normally needed for casual driving.
In my country manual used to be the default until as recently as 5 years ago; now automakers as well as customers are shifting towards automatics in a big way. They're just super convenient in crowded cities.
Whether I want a manual or an automatic depends on the nature of the car. If it's a small fun-to-drive car — like a Mini Cooper, BMW 3 series, porsches etc — I prefer manual.
But if it's a large luxury sedan or large SUV, then I will opt for automatic.
I ride a motorcycle most of the time, and I will always love manually pulling the clutch and clunking into the next gear; gives me more of a man and machine bond.
Growing up I raced motocross where changing gears, rev matching etc became second nature. Even on two stroke bikes were you typically perform more gear changes than on a four stroke engine
But I must admit, I struggled a little in a car. Car's required much finer movements than I was used to.
Don’t sell yourself short, aside from some select Italian brands, motorcycles usually have wet clutches (clutch basket bathed in oil) and are quite forgiving compare to the usually dry clutch in cars.
I think it might be. My youngest sister is currently learning to drive and the default option in the UK is to learn to drive a manual car. But what's the point? Petrol engines will eventually be illegal to buy and then at some point illegal to own. It's much faster and cheaper to learn to drive automatic cars, so why not?
The popular mechanics article should be back-dated at least 20 years. California just made ICE vehicles illegal this week. They will be completely phased out in 2035. While there are many dual motor electric vehicles, I believe this discussion is entirely unaware of the rapidly changing reality facing motor vehicles.
I’ll stay manual until I go electric. Every time I’ve tried automatic transmissions I had the feeling that the computer was struggling to figure out what I’m gonna do (upshift, downshift, accelerate slowly, accelerate agressively?) based on the limited input available. It always felt annoying compared to the direct control with a manual.
Which automatic have you tried most recently? I suspect it’s somewhat older than you may think, because even moderate quality automatics don’t often have that kind of constant gear hunting anymore. The ZF Friedrichshafen 8HP was a game changer for autos that don’t feel terrible but also relatively affordable, and they are everywhere now.
Ive always found automatics difficult to drive in the city, where they are suppose to make things easier. They just don't have the level of control i can get from a manual for quick acceleration to get out of side roads into traffic. Even in the "sport" mode i've found them sluggish, and it was a fairly new rental a few years ago.
Maybe the high end models get the really responsive automatic gearboxes, but i suspect not everyone can afford that, compared to any old cheap manual that can do the same thing.
Now, electric wont have that problem as i understand, so happy to drive without gears then.
Yes it is archaic - very crap in traffic but I never had any mechanical issues with a manual gearbox needing replacement in any of my cars except for normal wear and tear of the clutch plate.
Any quote involving a DSG or automatic gearbox from the VW/Audi/BMW is like buying a good second hand car.
Have we properly considered the effect on Hollywood? No car chase is complete without the timely down-shift, the roar of the engine and (usually) the massive fireball when the villain drives into a wall. With EVs/automatic transmission they're going to have to think of something else!
Thankfully heroes and villains in action movies always drive immaculately restored 70s muscle cars, so for the time being they'll be able to keep using a gear stick.
Not for much longer as manufacturers are thinning out their lineup. Even if they want to offer manual transmissions they won’t be able to do it economically any more.
In the end when most vehicles are electric, I wonder if manufacturers will continue making niche "mechanical" cars for motoring enthusiasts, not unlike how mechanical watches survive to this day even with digital and more accurate ways to keep time.
I often think about it too. The car seems to be much more complex than a mechanical watch. The watch can perform very well without regular maintenance but car cannot. And the latter can be very dirty, with all the oil, gasoline, dirt, smell, etc. Cars run on much much more harsh conditions with lots of exposed parts , one of whose failure can lead to the car being useless. Whereas for the watch basically everything is in an enclosure. It can go for decades without the need of opening.
Looks to me as though mechanical watches are doing better than surviving; they seem to be flourishing. Especially some of the more ridiculously expensive ones that have elaborations and complications such as tourbillions, etc.
Although the cryptocurrecny shakeout seems to have dulled the high-end watch market somewhat.
Of course they will. These threads are all so car-centric. Motorcycles are still a popular option, for the very reason you ponder. And most of them are still manual.
The end is near just because of EVs, most users do not care about real efficiency of manual vs automatic or kind of automatic gears, they just choose because of habits with a cloying trend to see only the good parts of their favorite choice.
I'm on my way to pick up a manual car today (BMW M2) I've just had about a year with a similar automatic car, but I miss the feel of the car when I'm shifting through gears.
The next car for me is probably going to something similar - or an EV.
The M2 is an interesting one because the manual in that car isn’t that good (typical BMW rubbery shifter, high clutch pedal with detent, clutch delay valve) while the Getrag 7 speed DCT feels like something out of a Lamborghini, but people were still buying a LOT of manual M2s.
I bet they'll eventually make electric cars with manual gearboxes and gearing to simulate this experience in an EV. You can already do this on your own with things like thr Ford EV crate motor that you can just bolt in any old car.
Along these lines, they already virtual gearboxes in China for license exams as fleets got electrified but the rules require passing with a manual transmission for a full license. Gear shifts and crucially, stalling all simulated with software. The electric motor, with its infinite torque, doesn't need real hardware gearboxes.
That's exactly it, lots of people grew up with it and enjoy the skill of it.
I just came back from Monterrey Motorsports Week where lots of rich old guys race many decades old race cars around the track. Again, inferior in every way to a modern car yet its a thing, a big thing.
Also nothing beats a snap change to third gear when you need to perform a overtaking maneuver on that slow trailer truck and there is oncoming traffic in a distance.
My experience of autoboxes is the slow glacial pace of stirring an engine.
I was fortunate enough to have a generous older sister with a well-worn Maverick. I don't ever regret driving a manual, but modern manufacturers are driving cars to be as boring as possible.
IMHO, manual transmissions are like hand-crank windows. Automatic (windows and transmissions) are more performant (with less "manual" intervention). That being said, I tend to prefer the manual option for both of these, especially on vehicles I plan to own long-term. They just work. If they do break, they do not take a rocket scientist to fix (or require totally replacing a component.)
It happens, but they're easier to tear down and repair / rebuild. Main problem that occurs in a manual is the synchronization gear mechanisms going bad (so you have to do the 1940's double de-clutching to manually synchronize), actual wear on the gears being worse because you can actually grind them, and clutch replacements (they are a wear part - essentially a giant brake pad between the engine and transmission).
Yelchin's case looks like a consequence of an unconventional user design for the gearstick, rather than a consequence of manual cars in general.
From The Washington Post [0]: "The parents of Anton Yelchin, the “Star Trek” actor who died in 2016 when his SUV rolled down his driveway and trapped him against a security gate, have reached a settlement with the makers of Jeep Grand Cherokee.
"[..] [In 2015], [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] began investigating the unconventional gearstick design on these cars, which was causing crashes because drivers were mistakenly shifting to neutral when they thought they were shifting to park.
"With a regular gearstick, drivers choose a transmission option (park, reverse, neutral, drive, etc.) by moving the stick into the corresponding notch or detent. Drivers can feel the stick settle into position.
"But a new, different, design was used in the cars affected by the recall, which include certain recent models of the Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger, and Jeep Grand Cherokee."
Thanks, that makes much more sense. I was visualizing the problem vehicle as a stick shift with the neutral in any of position but the center (aka in an "in gear" position), which in hindsight wouldn't work.
Just wait until we get viable electric mo'bikes! I don't remember exactly, but I think Michael Cyzsz was working on transmissions before he passed away.
I genuinely think this is part of the reason for cycling-as-hobby, aka Middle Aged Men In Lycra.
I want a hobby vehicle to present some sort of challenge. Now maybe you shouldn't ever be "challenging" yourself on a public road, but doing so in an old sports car at 45 mph, is clearly not the same level of risk to others as pushing equivalently in the modern version. It's just less acceptable, even before environmental concerns. So that leaves you with "push the throttle for maybe five seconds, then back off before you plough into a shared-use bridge at 120 mph" (something I've unfortunately seen, recently). Neat trick, but really a skill as such, is it?
Meanwhile, I hit 40 mph yesterday, on a twisty road, using gravity and oatmeal. That's my accomplishment.
Then there's the noise. An old sports car made noise because the designer wanted, was singularly focused on, making a powerful engine. A new car makes noise because, after the team of engineers make a powerful engine, then design an efficient suppressor system to comply with laws, the marketers come along and find regions of the engine map the laws do not cover, and order the engineers to make it very loud in those regions specifically. The former is charming, the latter is just cheap. More so when you're embarrassed by an EV - scratch that, a practical EV, with storage space and stuff - during acceleration.
And for all that, the sports car is still usually pretty rubbish on a track compared to a purpose-built vehicle. Pro tip: real mechanical engineers worry about heat dissipation. A lot. Really a lot. Your road car almost certainly doesn't have enough for sustained track work. They manage a few laps, then important components - the brake discs, brake pads, brake fluid, dampers, maybe even some of the sensors and power steering - start fading. Again, in comparison a few thousand on bike stuff gets you something entirely race-worthy. Yes I know it's still just a bicycle - it is - but you do notice the sense of purpose, that things are there because they make the vehicle better at its one job.
If OEMs want ICE sports cars, arguably any sports cars, to have a future, then the Top Trumps needs to stop. Rediscover that sense of purpose. Either the point is "fun at socially acceptable speeds", in which case manuals are just better because they're more fun, or it's "prove I have lots of money", in which case stick an electric motor in and coat the interior in gold, because the current crop of go-fasts don't have long for this earth, legislation will see to that.
I know it's a memel, but as a millennial with a 6MT, I know far more people in my age group who own manual cars, than older people (say over 45) who can drive one period. My brother an I are capable, as is my dad; one of my four aunts can, and none of my 7 grandparents can either. If I start looking at co-workers (fairly broad and distributed age range of 20-70) the same rings true, the only people daily-driving manuals are under 40, while easily 2/3 of that 20-45 age group can drive manual; conversely of those in the 46+ range, it seems closer to 1/3 are capable of driving, and almost all of them because they have a manual classic.
People seem to forget the automatic transmission started mass production in 1939, and take-rates in the US well-exceeded 50% by the late '60s/early '70s.
Maybe American millennials. When I did my test in the UK manuals were most cars. You can do your test in an automatic but if you do, you can only drive automatics legally. Which can cause some problems especially if you want to hire a car.
Almost all the millennials my age can drive and and a good percentage probably own a manual. Automatics are gaining ground in the UK but they're still typically more expensive. I suspect 17 year olds are still learning to drive manuals in the UK right now.
Europeans in general have way more car skills than the average American.
My understanding is that EU driving tests are vastly more difficult than US. You lot are throwing cars sideways, on purpose, and recovering from it to get your license.
Here it’s just use your turn signal, stay between the lines, and don’t crash.
This! About ten years ago, I had to make a late visit to a rental property in a rougher part of Atlanta. Walking back to my 1995 Accord Ex Coupe w/ manual gears (they probably made about a dozen of these…) some kids appeared out of the darkness. One had a gun pointed at me. Asked for the keys. I handed them over. And then asked, “do you know how to drive a stick?” Gun-boy said yes, and they climbed into the car. Engine starts. Car sits there. About 30 seconds later, they all got out and asked what else I had.
Cost of that evening? One already vintage iPhone 4. Still driving manual, but not visiting properties in the dark any more.
And here lies electric_mayhem, buried with the last manual transmission, just as he always wanted. No grave robber will disturb his grave, nor know how to use his buried treasure.
Maybe you're thinking Gen Z? I'm a millennial and I learned to drive around the turn of the millennium (midwestern state so a year or 2 earlier than most). My parents owned a few sticks over the years and they weren't that uncommon in the 90s. Alot of our first cars would be hand me downs from 80s/early 90s, when stick was not uncommon.
Just another example of us being the butt of jokes from boomers, even when it's not the case. :)
My current car is a low milage 1991 Acura Integra 5-speed manual. I bought it party because it would have been one of the cool cars to have back in high school. No one would have thought the manual would be that out of place back then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32397975
I will give up my manual transmission, if you will bring back pull-knobs, twist knobs and other tactile switches for the main controls of my vehicle, with the appropriate tactile feedback at set points so I can set them without looking.
After thinking on it, I am going to raise my demands, however: you also need to produce cars that are as visually appealing and reasonably sized as in the 50s and 60s. Fire all your designers, go back to whatever your models were in 1965, and begin anew. When in doubt, don't.