2/18/2023 0 Comments Stick shift![]() While a manual is typically cheaper to purchase than an automatic, stick shifts no longer necessarily beat automatics on gas mileage.īut there is reward, too: I feel much more in tune with my car and with what’s around me. Meanwhile, the frugality of buying a manual transmission has become less clear. You can’t zone out because of the layers of factors involved in choosing how to move your car: is the highway flat and traffic-free enough for me to cruise in fifth gear? Do I use second or third gear for this off ramp? Is the grade steep enough that I need to downshift to get up that hill? Even parking is a checklist: did I pull the emergency brake and put the car in first gear after I turned off the car? You never stop assessing the situation as the vehicles and landscapes ahead change. In those first weeks of Wrangler ownership, my legs and ankles and feet ached everyday.ĭriving stick requires constant mental vigilance. It’s not just learning the dance of releasing the clutch and pushing the gas pedal at the exact right time – a delicate maneuver that’s so elusive that, on my drive home from Texas, I pulled into a Denny’s parking lot in Virginia and sobbed – but it’s physical work, too. Sixteen-year-old me appreciated that, because driving an automatic is easy. Driving stick requires constant mental vigilance My parents had stick shift cars in their teens and early 20s, but they too moved to automatics by the time I was old enough to drive. “Most people don’t grow up driving manuals,” said David Petrovski, an analyst at IHS Automotive. In one generation, Americans have gone from almost everyone learning stick and having some story about stalling in inappropriate places (or, as happened to my friend Jennie, decapitating a statue of the Virgin Mary while learning to drive in a church parking lot) to the skill becoming a novelty, like knowing how to solve a Rubik’s cube. ![]() During the past few years, only 4% of new cars sold in the US had manual transmission.
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