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Comment by arielweisberg | Hacker News Reader

I learned to drive stick at 34 just for fun. Now own a Mazda 3 and MX-5. Worth it.

It's not about out performing an automatic transmission it's about engagement. For some people that's not going to have any value. For others there is no going back to numb econoboxes with automatic transmissions.

It's a shame more people don't get over the hump and get to see what driving can be vs. what it is for most.

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I feel the same way.

City traffic commutes and long highway cruises seem to be what most people think of when they think about driving, but it can be so much more than that.

Few things are as fun as a balanced car on twisty mountain roads, and in that recipe the manual transmission is a key ingredient.

I have completely the opposite view. To me, all the "engagement" type arguments just feel like someone telling me that they still insist on using only rotary telephones, because it makes them feel more "engaged" with the telephone, "closer to the machine", etc.

So I don't find anything magical or special about having to manually manage the gears when a computer could do it more efficiently and relieve me of the need to worry about it. When I'm driving I want to be focused on the road and traffic around me, not micromanaging the way the engine is transmitting power.

Or maybe to go with a car analogy: what if we took away your accelerator pedal and replaced it with a crank attached to a fuel pump, so you had to constantly turn the crank to get fuel, and turn it faster or slower to manage the throttle and the amount of fuel going to the engine? You'd be much more deeply "connected" to your car that way, but would you rhapsodize about what a wonderful experience it was? Or would you see it for what it is: a task that can be done with more efficiency and less distraction by a different approach?

There's nothing magical about it... With a manual, there are two free parameters: Engine speed and its coupling to the wheels. With an automatic transmission, only the engine speed can be controlled by the driver.

Computers have gotten better at managing the coupling sensibly, but they still are not perfect at predicting drivers' future intentions.

Computers have gotten better at managing the coupling sensibly, but they still are not perfect at predicting drivers' future intentions.

This argument basically says that if the computer only does it better in 99.99999999999999999% of cases, the correct solution is to have the computer handle 0% of cases. Which makes no sense.

(also, almost all "automatics are terrible at anticipating what needs to happen" arguments are based on decades-old experiences, as if automatic transmissions are fixed in time and incapable of improving)

> To me, all the "engagement" type arguments just feel like someone telling me

I don't drive stick, but I think it would help me considerably.

Even with 8+ hours of sleep, 3 cups of coffee, music blasting in my ears, and the windows open I often find that driving for longer than 30 minutes on the open road (i.e. no traffic) starts to put me to sleep.

I have very mixed feelings about this -- I walk and bicycle quite a lot, so I'm not deeply engaged with driving being fun, nor do I think it's really a great thing if drivers are having fun driving. Fun means more people spending more time on the roads endangering my life. But on the other hand, I learned on a stick. It really is more fun and I miss it.

I don't think fun has to equal unsafe. Manuals provide an opportunity to have fun doing things like matching downshifts and thinking about what you are doing. Both can be done within the confines of safe, legal operation.

And this is where the MX-5 and other suitably configured cars excel. They give you a sense of motion and acceleration at legal and safe speeds that a typical car won't. Even some that are supposed to be sporty, but define sporty as "more power."

Most cars are designed to make you feel nothing and hear nothing. Nothing from the road and nothing from the engine.

It’s more fun to drive a slow car fast than a fast car slow. I own a few motorcycles and the biggest one has a 450cc motor for this very reason.

I think GP's point is that people who have fun driving drive more frequently, which is inherently unsafe.

Indeed. As a cyclist, I'm absolutely safer when there is less traffic. Less traffic means motorists have fewer other moving objects to distract them from not killing me.

It’s unclear to me that more driving equates to more danger. Driving is currently very unsafe but that is a product of the drivers. If drivers were safer driving itself would also be safer.

Every extra person driving a car adds to the total risk to everyone.

I'm of the understanding that "safer" driving is a function with an asymptote well above zero, i.e. there's only so much that a person's skill as a safe driver will improve the net safety of the system.

I'd like to add that I'm not just talking about the safety of the extra person driving; there's also the safety of the other road users, whether in cars, on motorcycles, on bicycles, or on foot. An extra driver on the road raises the net risk for everyone.

Additionally, in my experience the intersection of "drives for fun" and "drives safely" is so close to zero that it's not worth considering.

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