Biblically accurate transmission

"How many hydraulic levers you need?"

"All of them"

"How many hydraulic-driven pieces of equipment does your rig have?"

"Mind your own business"

you aren't supposed to show people what the control panel to the mcflurry machine looks like

Manual occupies their phone hand. How is someone supposed to heart content so the algorithm gives them more of it!

Using the PRiNDle opens one up for so many activities.

What the fuck is a "classically trained driver"?

I've actually observed the opposite. Automatics leave more brain cells to focus on traffic.

"Self driving" cars on the other hand...

Do you sing an aria by Mozart or something when you drive? But anyway, in my experience driving manual makes people more distracted because they have to think about gears and the clutch and stuff. Sure, a competent driver will not have any difficulty with that, but there's an awful lot of them out there that don't quite fall into that category.

Now think about how much worse they would drive if they had to switch their concentration from the road to the transmission.

Only just noticed Your username. For a moment I thought You were serious.

Stupid is as stupid does. A significant portion of trucking accidents involve the truck driver missing a cue because they were mid gear change.

While it is good to have a person learn to drive stick, it is really hard to get people to learn how to drive if they have zero interest in actually learning how to be a driver, no matter what transmission.

I personally like dual clutch transmissions and daily'ed a car to 175k miles with one, yet I went out of my way to find a manual version of my current car, figuring this will be my last oppurtunity to drive such a vehicle.

I mean, I've driven only automatics my whole life, with the odd exception of a friend's ATV or whatnot, but I know when and how to use an e brake (and/or dual foot the brake pedal and gas pedal) to start a car on an incline, when said car has an automatic transmission...

EDIT: Also, most automatics will let you attempt a rolling start in neutral... I've done this many times, either rolling downhill or having people push.

You're not gonna uninvent automatic transmissions.

Assuming you're American (I doubt a non American would name themselves 'Boomer Humor'), what you could do is mandate people completely retest, written and driving tests, for their liscenses every 5 years, then every 2 years after some age cutoff (60? 65?) then every single year after another age cutoff (70? 75?)... instead of just assuming that because they passed the test once in their life, all their skills and knowledge are perfect and up to date for the rest of their lives.

Most people think they are much better drivers than they actually are, so lets actually reality check them on that.

Probably more related to the god-awful infrastructure design in the US, like stroads and an unfathomable tendency to use stop signs for a lot of things they are just not fit for, like to replace speed bumps, chicanes, and roundabouts.

Also the better comparable statistic should be deaths per distance traveled in cars.

I would, but I ran out of crayons

What if we're too American to draw an appropriate conclusion from that?

Quick Google

In 2024 36% of Germans reported using the car daily.

In 2023 95.3% of Americans older than 16 drive on occasions.

83 million Germans, 63% above 16

340 million Americans, 65% above 16

52 million potential drivers in Germany, 17 million actually drive

221 million potential drivers in America, 210 million drive daily

17 million vs 210 million daily drivers

~12x more drivers, only 2x more death

Per capita isn't really a way to look at it

Besides automatic cars or lack of a manual transmission is not causing accidents.

Chance of death goes up significantly with speed

No one has ever crashed because they couldn't go over the speed limit

cvts are reliable

Now THAT'S a statement made by the utterly deranged

EVs don't shift

I know there's no reason for them to, but a small part of me wishes there was. Something so satisfying about being good at managing gears

Isn't the civic si series all manual?

When I learned how to drive, manual transmissions were higher performance and better fuel efficiency: side by side comparisons of the exact same model of car would show better 0-60 and quarter mile times, while having slightly better EPA fuel efficiency ratings, for the manual transmission.

At some point, though, the sheer number of gears in an automatic transmission surpassed those in the typical manual gearbox, and the average automatic today has 6 gears, up to 9 in some Mercedes and 10 in certain Ford and GM models. So they could start selecting gear ratios for better fuel efficiency, without "wasting" a valuable gear slot. There was a generation of Corvettes that was notorious for having a 6th gear that was worthless for actual performance but helped the car sneak by with a better highway fuel mileage rating.

And the automatics became much faster at shifting gears, with even the ultra high performance supercars shifting to paddle shifters where the driver could still control the gear, but with the shifting mechanism automated. Ferrari's paddle shifter models started outperforming the traditional stick shift models in the early 2000's, if I remember correctly. As those gear shifting technologies migrated over to regular automatics, the performance gap shrunk and then ended up going the other way.

At this point there's not enough reason for a true manual stickshift transmission. It's no longer faster or more economic, so it's just a pure fun. Which is fine, but does make it hard to actually design one for any given model of car.

Had a manual 2016 Mazda 3. Took a bit to find it with all the options I wanted but it was available at the time.

I was going to say, I always had my e-brake on when I parked my car and so I always started the car with it on.

Does he mean slowly let off the clutch while releasing the e-brake? Does he put on his e-brake if he stops on a hill, in traffic too!

We'd park my buddies Mustang on a hill wherever we went in case it wouldn't start. LOL, everyone made fun of him saying it was a Pinto. (<- it was this, but really, really shitty)

What the hell is this design.

Bruh, that's almost worse than Tesla

They don't, and that's the way I like 'em!

I love my automatic transmission and cruise control, but I do think that I may have been a better driver when I drove stick. By necessity, I had to pay closer attention to the road than I have to today.

LET'S FUCKING TAKE THE BUS

Hi, !fuckcars mod here. I absolutely love my manual transmissions and unironically fully endorse this meme.

I think you might be surprised at just how much crossover there is between car enthusiasts and people who hate car dependency. Cars ought to be like horses: they should be available for enthusiasts to play with, but it should be wholly unnecessary and considered kinda ridiculous to use them as routine transportation, especially in cities.

Frankly, I would prefer it if all transmissions were manual, as it would help encourage people who see driving as a chore to use other transportation modes instead.

EVs weren’t viable for long distance travel before though. Like batteries didn’t have the energy density they have today. The advancements in battery tech relied heavily on the advancements in computing tech. Like for battery research, manufacturing, battery management. And research in computer technology has never stopped.

Even if they never stopped making electric cars, they would have stayed short distance vehicles for a long time since battery tech didn’t advance fast enough. We might have gotten long distance EVs a decade sooner but definitely not decades. And fast charging is also only possible because of miniaturization of computer chips, nobody would’ve bought an EV that can travel less than 100km and take a full day to charge for their primary mode of transportation .

With Tesla burning right now (sometimes literally), I'm concerned for the future of EVs.

There are other EV-only makers, most notably in my mind, rivian, but not many others come to mind.

Most other manufacturers have either stopped making EVs entirely, or switched to hybrid, or hybrid adjacent technologies. Honda is a good example of this backpedaling. They dipped their collective toes into EVs with proper hybrid vehicles during the pre-pandemic years. Between 2015 and 2020 (ish) they had a PHEV, the clarity. It was discontinued in 2020. I forget if the last model year was 2019 or 2020. Either way, I still kind of want one.... Regardless, they took everything they learned and put it into their fancy new e-CVT, which essentially, at most speeds, turns the gasoline motor of the vehicle into a generator, powering an electric motor that drives the wheels.

Don't get me wrong, that's still more efficient than burning the Jurassic forests to drive motion, but it's not as efficient as running the drive motor from batteries that were charged from green sources.

Most other manufacturers have done something similar in abandoning BEVs for HEVs or whatever Honda is doing. There's a few stand out exceptions, like the F150 lightening. Good on you Ford... But the list is pretty short, especially compared to the fuel based alternatives.

It's a good time for other companies to pick up the ball that Tesla dropped here, and I'm hoping they do. .... I mean, they won't because they're too busy buying yachts with all that fossil fuel bribe money they get, but I can dream.

As a programmer, I am more than happy automating a task for which I will never recoup my automation time investment.

It’s the principle of the thing.

It's not like you can use that time freed by automating gear shifting for something else.

It's a tool, yes, but personally, I like having more control over tools I use. I'd choose a cordless drill that I can set the torque control myself over one that doesn't have that option.

I totally understand people who like the whole ritual of the manual car. Hell, that's how I feel about music making. But there's something to be said for just getting something to happen without much effort.

Pretty much every consumer in every auto market agrees with you. There are downsides to manual, you can grind a transmission's gears to dust in a couple of days if you do it wrong, you really can't trust someone to drive your car at all, you are much more actively driving, so you're paying more attention, but you're also more stressed, if you're in bumper to bumper traffic, you will have to do the most difficult aspects of driving every few seconds to inch along for a half hour or more and that's REALLY shitty, if you need to stop on any kind of hill, you have to be aware your gonna need half a car length or more to get into gear where your just going to be falling down that hill while you convince yourself you don't need to panic and you will catch the gear before you're past the point of no return. You get better mileage, you get better control, you pay attention more, you focus more, but it's not all roses, the risks usually aren't worth it for modern car buyers.

Not just EVs, modern beltless CVTs and automatic transmissions make manual transmissions practically obsolete. With a wider set of gear ranges and way better performance and reliability they're better in almost every way than a stick shift. That said, doesn't matter how good a transmission is if it's undersized for the engine, so I'm not say the transmission in any particular vehicle is good, just the tech has developed in recent years

Clutches are for the weak. Grind em till you find em.

Person with back and knee issues here: worth it to not have to deal with a slushbox that won't downshift when I need it to. I'll never give up my manual.

There must be a trans joke in here somewhere.

Happens at higher age

Agreed

That's not true. Honda selled more manual than automatic cars in the past year.

There are plenty of cars offering manual transmission, its just not available for every CSR out there. If you want to have fun with it you can.

Technically they have at least 2 "gears", forward and reverse. But does it really count if all you do is shout at the angry pixies to run the other way?

I live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and regularly drove my standard transmission in San Francisco (one of the hilliest cities in North America), and used my hand brake all the time to maintain my position while I engaged the transmission. I'm not really sure what you're on about...

that handbrake start is utterly useles

In my native country that was a requirement for the driving test.

Yeah, I've heard tons of tricks over the years.

Just be fast. That's the trick, practice and you'll get fast at applying just the right amount of clutch in an instant.

I'm curious, how do u do it? I mean you need a foot on gas and one on the clutch to start, how do you keep your car still without handbrake (other than just being quick after moving away from the brake)?

You'll die of 3st

I always drive manual but my husband likes automatic. My kids learned on his car but my penultimate daughter drives mine to school now. I dunno, shifting seems easy to learn once you know how to drive in general - I learned it because everyone else was drunk one night so I had to drive home, when I was a teenager, and the drunk kid's car was manual.

ETA: I let the school kids use the car and got myself an e-bike because their commute loop is much longer than mine. I have an enjoyable ride in to work. But tell them to baby the car because it may be my last gas-powered car and I will miss the stick shift. Have not had an automatic transmission car for 30 years now.

Check your owners manual to see if you have a button to disable "overdrive", it's for adverse conditions such as uphill or downhill, off-road or rainy, etc. It prevents the shifting up too early and gives each gear more range to operate in. By default it's on because it saves fuel, and they make the button hard to find sometimes.

I drove one of the first semi trucks with an automatic transmission, and that thing was dangerous. It would pop me out of gear going down hill, thank fuck the brakes held out. The reverse gear could either roll the rig back at 10 inches per hour, or 10mph, and not much in-between.

Was nice being able to sip a coffee through traffic tho

Damn. Ours doesn't behave that way.

Manuals are definitely niche now and mainly in sporty cars (Civic SI, Type R, BRZ, Supra, etc).

Jeeps are the bottom of the barrel for reliability and build quality, so godspeed on your journeys.

Do you also pay people to whip you? It seems like you like being hurt.

She'll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene.

What country is this car from?

Yeah pre year ~2000 cars are a bit different lmao

I love when it backfires and accidentally breaks your arm! So manly!!!

I live in a city famous for it's bad traffic, but prefer driving a manual anyway (when driving a car, at least -- actual first place goes to riding my bicycle).

And also fail people that tried to drive backwards by looking back instead of using the mirrors.

Huh, that's interesting because I was tought to do the opposite. In practice, I do whichever feels right, usually mirrors but I've noticed in pickups I'd rather just look back

I've owned ten cars and eight were manual transmission. Currently driving a 2020 Subaru Crosstrek with a manual. We bought it for my wife but she developed severe hip problems right after we bought it. So I made it my own - a 2" lift, smaller wheels with off road tires, aftermarket intake and exhaust, added a subwoofer under the passenger seat, tinted the windows etc.

I probably wouldn't have bought it for me but now I love it. It's been up some crazy mountain trails where the only other people I saw at the top were in jeeps or similar. It's been in deep snow and deep sand. I've even broken an axle, no regrets. I use it to it's full potential and I love being able to be in exactly the gear I want to be.

what a silly ass thing to take pride in.

Your bike has automatic transmission?

For real! Who uses the handbreak apart from actually parking somewhere? Even then it's not required, though I prefer it that way.

I bought a new car with a manual transmission this year. It has a cool feature called “hill start assist”. Basically for the first 3 seconds I won’t roll backwards. It’s been nice.

Joke is that it is an automatic

Ours has a stick configuration. Fellow Frank supporter

Depends on how steep the hill is and how precise you need to be with your position. Parallel parking in San Francisco almost requires the handbrake.