I learned to drive in a manual. Now that my son is getting close to driving age, I wanted to teach him in a manual first, like I learned - and then I found out it's damned near impossible to _find_ one any more.
I find people who learned how to drive manual to be better drivers - they tend to think ahead which is understandable. One does not really want to shift just to jump ahead of one car to see that there's nowhere to go. It is too bad that fewer and fewer people have this skill.
I hypothesize that outlawing the automatic transmission would have an amazing effect on traffic. If everybody is driving a manual then there will be more foresight; and at the least you're probably reducing the driving pool by 10%
It definitely makes you look a little farther ahead to plan your moves so you don't have to constantly keep working the clutch to move forward another couple feet like folks with automatics do.
Same. I bought a Tacoma a couple of years ago, and while there was technically a manual option available, nobody actually had one, or could tell me when I could get one.
We have a 2012 Manual V6 Tacoma; it was what sold me on it as its getting rare to find them. The dealer told me since Generation 2 only 5% of Tacomas (1 in 20) are manual.
I confess I gained a ton of respect for Klik & Klack was when they gave the advice to not teach kids on a stick shift.
This is akin to teaching a kid to ride a 21 speed bike. They can probably get up to that rather quickly, all told, but just learning the basics of balance and pedaling will already be difficult enough.
Similarly, just learning the basics of the car will already be tough. Why add to it? Why not take away power steering? Because it would make it harder.
I'm not sure it's really that big a deal. My dad taught me to drive by going out to a lonely national park with a lot of parking lots and letting me figure it out. On an automatic, yes. 20 minutes later he said, okay, good, now drive us home. And I did. Driving isn't that magic. So I will probably teach my kids how to drive our pickup first, and then for laughs we will take my 455 horsepower Camaro out to learn how a manual works. And then they will not be driving it much after, hahahaha...
I think I started learning manual transmissions when I was about 8 years old, riding with my father. He'd pick less busy stretches of road and tell me I had to shift for him, while he operated the clutch. At first, he told me what gear to move to next, then started to just say "shift" and expect me to have figured out we need to upshift or downshift, and eventually he would just warn me I was on duty and then expect me to anticipate and synchronize with his pedal actions without further voice signals.
When I was tall enough, he'd have me move his car around on our long driveway so I learned to feather the clutch for start/stop maneuvers in first gear. By the time I was getting my learner's permit and hitting the road for the first time, I already had the theory and practice for the drive-train and could focus on the more important traffic rules and vigilance.
I still remember his "graduation" test for me, which was taking me on a ride to a nearby very steep hill and parallel parking. Then, he gave me the keys and said very sincerely that I needed to pull out, drive around the neighborhood, return, and park back in the same spot without burning the clutch and without stalling the engine...
Driving is one of those things that most of us probably have no clue how everyone else actually thinks about and does it.
To that end, I just don't know. I expect I will have an issue teaching my children. Biking has already thrown me some curve balls. Nothing insurmountable. But the more you have on the bike, the harder it is for the learner to get it going.
I mean, I hate biking without my shoes that attach to the pedal nowdays. I would not at all attempt to teach my kids on such a bike for a while.
Oh man, I remember how long it took me to learn to ride a bike. Quite a lot longer than driving a car, I'm afraid. Learning that you have to turn one way, fall, and turn the other way is definitely counterintuitive and requires your brain to do some rewiring.
I also hate attaching my feet to the pedals. I do not want to confess that I've hit the ground in a very undignified manner more than once because I couldn't get my feet unclipped in time :(
Falling down is no big deal and expected. Why you should always weara helmet. My favorite is wheni released my left foot, but leaned right. Did that twice.
Nowadays, i feel more stable clipped in.
And i know countersteering is a thing. Don't really process it, though.
As I said ... we will go learn to drive the monster, and then they will not really get many opportunities after that. Show some responsibility and I may let them drive it some more with me in the car, but it will be some time before I trust them to have unlimited access to a high performance car.
Though to be fair, the latest iteration of the stability and traction control is pretty amazing. Short of turning it off, or driving with inappropriate tires for conditions, I can't really get the car out of shape without turning off the nannies. I can hang it out a bit but I could never manage to pull off those beautiful crowd-killing losses of control that Mustangs seem to apt to pull at Cars & Coffee events around the country.
So aside from just driving too fast and making physics an insurmountable issue, they could probably drive it pretty safely if I somehow made it so the nannies could not be disabled.
The latest iterations of stability control have gotten quite good. I can drive my '18 1LE like a jerk, in the rain, on twisty roads and other than the flashing of the warning light it's not really intrusive, it just keeps me from going sideways. Quite remarkable how well they've dialed it in. Once in a while it does kill the fun too abruptly, but mostly it just makes you think the car has vastly more traction than it does.
Agreed. I learned on an automatic at 15 and then "upgraded" on my own to a manual in my 20s because I wanted one. Adding in a manual transmission makes driving non-trivially harder. Just learning the basics of not hitting things, merging, keeping an eye out for traffic, signaling, etc., is hard enough for beginners.
When I was learning to drive my parents taught me in an old early 80's beat up station wagon. It was manual and had no power steering and the worst clutch I've ever used to this day. It took me a long time to learn to drive.
A few years later they sold the car and both my sisters learnt to drive in more modern automatics.
My learning experience was miserable but after learning in that old crappy wagon I can drive just about anything now. Once you have parked a car without power steering any other parking you have to do in a modern car feels like a complete non issue.
That's because the steering wheel gears are different in a car made for manual steering than one made for power steering. The manual steering wheel has quite a bit more leverage.
I drive a manual steered car. It's no problem at all. It's more physical than fingertip control, sure, but I like that. You can feel the road better.
I definitely would not recommend. Manual I think is ok to learn but I'd insist on power steering and modern safety features.
I own a manual currently. One big disadvantage (or possibly an advantage...) is when Friends ask to borrow car you need to ask "Can you drive a manual?" 9/10 times I've found answer is no.
I taught my daughter using a car that had no power steering. But it was a Nissan Micra, so it was still physically possible for her to turn the steering wheel while the car was parked...
And I learned a lot of things without modern tools. Doesn't mean I was better for it. Or that I didn't make more mistakes than I might have, had I been given better tools.
Just look up survivor bias sometime. It is a thing. This is an common refrain of it.
> Why not take away power steering? Because it would make it harder.
What? Have you even driven anything that's not a big truck without power steering (and I don't mean a car with power steering disabled). It's not _that_ big a difference, if at all.
Have you seen a 16 year old try? Many failures are an adding up of a bunch of "not a big difference" differences. Why take that risk?
You would clearly stop short of taking away vision. Why not make people drive with a vehicle that doesn't have a rear window? All told, shouldn't be that big of a deal. That said, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/05/02/backup-... was a headline story for a reason.
I had a mini for a year or two; one of the little ones that would just about fit inside the back of that BMW thing they call a "mini" now. I could see how it could surprise someone who's learning to drive, or isn't used to a car without power steering - the wheel is substantially harder to turn when the car isn't rolling.
