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Comment by gpt5 | Hacker News Reader

The counter argument is that European vehicles are vastly using manual gear, despite the fact that except for a small minority, no one cares about the potential difference in torque.

There is just a lot of people that are used the a certain solution and are resistant to change.

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There are economic and regulatory factors involved, it is more complex than people being resistant to change which no doubt makes up part of it.

In the UK, for example, automatic cars are more expensive to buy and insure [1]. They also tend to be more expensive to learn how to drive as instructors mostly have manual cars to teach with.

This incentivises new drivers towards manual cars, especially as younger drivers are more likely to be in lower-paying jobs and therefore more price conscious.

There is also a separate license category for automatic cars. If you have this license you are not allowed to drive manual cars, whereas the manual license entitles the holder to drive both. Therefore most new drivers opt to learn manual for the flexibility and the cost reasons.

1: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/car-insurance/automatic-car...

I find it hard to imagine it would take significantly more than 15 minutes for most people to ‘learn’ how to drive an automatic car even if they only drove a manual before.

The UK authorities agree with you: if you pass the exam with a manual car you can use both, but if you pass it with an automatic one, you can only drive automatic ones.

It's the entirety of Europe - manual=both, automatic=automatic only.

Switzerland had that, but abandoned the distinction in 2019: now there are no transmission restrictions on Swiss licenses.

Source: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmittei..., grep for Automateneintrag

Muscle memory is a bitch. Two things I’ve done going from a manual to an automatic, sometimes a year after:

Slam on the brake as if you’re using the clutch. Automatic brake pedals are more than wide enough to accommodate two feet, and attempting to upshift and slamming on the brake instead can really rattle your brain bucket.

Throw the automatic into park. Less of an issue these days, but it used to attempt to actually go into park, with the shenanigans you’d imagine there would be as the parking pin attempted to engage with the forcefully spinning gears.

Moving from manual to power brakes is also a recipe for slamming on the brakes..

In high school, I drove a really old car with manual everything (including brakes). Our drivers ed class was taught on 80s american sedans, with overboosted power steering and brakes where you could probably just touch them with a single toe to stop. Coming from the manual brakes in my car where I needed to stand on them to stop, I'd inadvertently slam on the brakes early in my turn at the wheel and throw everyone against the seatbelt tensioners..

I once had power brakes fail in my car, (vacuum line leak, rubber connections disintegrated with age, thus: no turbo and no brakes) but needed to go on 300 km trip (in hindsight, I contracted get-there-itis and this was unnecessary risk). At first: woah, I have no brakes! But after few minutes I got used that I need to stand on the pedal and it somewhat braked. But it was surprising when I finally replaced that rubber piece: obviously I knew about this, but for first few stops I slammed the brakes hard anyway.

I've never pulled that one but I've done a couple of very hard stops coming off the freeway. Long drive, tired, I hear the engine RPMs dropping and my foot comes down on the "clutch" as my hand goes for the gearshift. I learned on a car with a very stiff clutch, I catch the brake pedal and it's going to the floor. (My father had a bad habit of riding the clutch while going through the gears. A mechanic friend deliberately put in a stiffer spring to minimize the damage.)

Smoothly operating a manual has to be muscle memory and whenever you're dealing with muscle memory there's the issue of unintended capture. It doesn't take much to reprogram things like learning the actual working range of *this* clutch but skipping it entirely takes a lot more learning.

I'm not saying it's hard (I had to, given the automatic rental when visiting the US), but it's not just about learning how to do it, it's also about reflexes, which you don't unlearn in 15 minutes. Sure you can learn to consciously suppress them, but the habit of finding a pedal with your left foot when accelerating/decelerating lures behind it for a lot longer.

Somewhat surprisingly, in the UK Autotrader lists 230k manual cars and 195k automatics

So the fraction of manual-transmission cars in the UK is much lower than I would have expected.

no one cares about the potential difference in torque

This stops being true the first time you depress the accelerator on an EV. My Kia has a 0-60 time comparable to a low-end Porsche.

Are you saying that like it's an obvious and irrefutable benefit? Having driven two EVs, I can safely say that 0-60 times specifically, and acceleration in general, are totally irrelevant to me. As long as the vehicle has no issues accelerating on the on-ramp (so most cars from the last 30years), everything extra is useless.

The actual reason for having gears even with EVs in european vehicles, is mostly the "one plattform" approach which carmakers here afraid to go all in on EVs. Hybrids, traditional combustion and EVs are expected to share as many parts as possible - which of course as all engineering compromises go means you become 2nd best in all areas.

Any examples of cars where that's the case?

The Kia Niro is available in three models: Petrol, Hybrid and EV. Now, I have the EV and it doesn't have any gears, but I'm pretty sure there is a lot of things shared between these cars.

To your point, the Niro hybrid IIRC does still use a 6 speed transmission as opposed to something like a Prius, or Fusion. Those use an eCVT (much simpler planetary gearset to control power flow between ICE, electric motor, and the wheels.)

For new cars that's not true anymore.

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