The stick shift might survive the electric revolution | Hacker News Reader

The stick shift might survive the electric revolution

robbreport.com

123 pointsrntn329 comments

I taught a 16-year-old (not my son) to drive a stick. It was easy. I checked online and there's a place that will teach you the basics for $295. I'd do it for half. There's not much demand for that, unfortunately.

The biggest magic tricks to teaching were (1) teaching him to think about gear changes before actually doing them, and (2) being relaxed about mistakes.

For (1) I would drive, and have him tell me when to shift. This gets over the intellectual hurdle of coordinating engine speed with road speed.

For (2), I just said, "OK, you're going to stall the car, and you're going to grind the gears. Everybody does. It's no big deal. Here, watch, I'll do it." Then I'd stall & grind the gears, show him to get out of the grinding, and laugh about it. I think anxiety is the biggest problem.

I'm sure if it's your own son or daughter, it gets more complicated :)

don't forget the first time you have to start on a hill. or brake. first time I had to brake hard I forgot to put in the clutch and that was the whole front end.

Er, what? It should have just killed the engine.

as the engine was stalling out it caught and lurched forward

isn't braking more effective if you don't put in the clutch? it kills the engine, but has the advantage of using said engine to break

It is entirely irrelvant in any modern car as brakes are always stronger than your tire grip, unless you track the car and break over and over again often.

But theoretically not on hard braking as plainly engine have enough inertia that it wouldn't get to "engine braking" phase when you just slammed on brake. You'd be braking both car and engine.

On light braking, sure.

Also, in an emergency situation, it's better to keep things consistent. Save the fancy moves for when you have time and space. Any sign of trouble? Both feet in, no hesitation. Unless you train stopping with the clutch out.

Many modern stickshifts have hill assist, so if you're fortunate enough to be teaching on a model with this, you either want to temporarily disable it (if possible) or at least communicate the right way to do it and what might happen if they're going to driver an older car.

I don't know if it's just the couple of cars I've driven do it badly or if they're typical of hill assist on all cars, but I really hate this feature. It always seems to keep the break on longer than I want, and on a couple of occasions even causes me to stall because I tried to accelerate away and couldn't move. Now I usually put the hand-break on because I find it easier to find the biting point [0] and move from there (pretty much in one smooth motion, not needing to pause at the biting point).

I've never bothered to think more about it, because it doesn't cause me any trouble doing that, and afaik there's no harm to the car doing it this way, but maybe somebody has advice on how to use hill assist without finding it so annoying? (Or news that in most cars, hill assist is better than the ones I've used?)

[0] Biting point being where you pull your foot gradually off the clutch, not all the way but to the point that the front of the car bonnet starts to rise slightly, which is the point that you can remove the hand-break as you keep declutching without rolling backwards down the hill. Was one of the trickier things for me when learning to drive, but incredibly easy once you're used to it.

I too just use the handbrake since it feels natural after growing up with it. By the time I'm accelerating I mostly don't notice if any hill-assist was engaged - but this may be a factor of my particular car, and I'm unfortunately unaware of how it feels in some other modern stickshifts.

I haven't driven a manual with hill assist, but indeed this is a difficult thing to master especially on an unfamiliar car. It takes a while to get used to the pedals on any car, much more so the clutch. Drifting backwards down a hill is a scary thing to happen at first!

I find that automatic drivers aren't used to engaging with the handbrake, which is the real secret to starting up a hill.

OMG, that would be sadistic to start like that!

This is why I just use the parking brake to hold the car in place. Then I only really have to coordinate the use of the clutch and the accelerator without having to worry about the car moving back, no matter how steep the hill.

You just have to feel the car pushing foward while the parking brake is still engaged and just release the parking brake while the car starts moving forward.

Those are both really good tips for teaching driving stick, as well as (by metaphor) a lot of other things. Thanks so much for sharing!

This is great advice - I learned a slightly different way…

I’d saved up for a while when I was 20ish, and I wanted a NEW car. Only thing I could get a loan for was the cheapest offering - a stripped manual Honda Fit. I fell in love with it and ordered one from Japan (they didn’t have a fully stripped version for sale in my town, so it was a “special” order).

Long story short, I learned to drive stick for the first time when I picked it up from the lot with zero miles and had to drive it home, and then to work the next day… that first commute was UGLY. But I more or less had the hang of it by the time I got home that night. I still drive that car daily almost two decades later - and I absolutely still love it. It’s never needed one thing beyond regular maintenance in all those 150k miles. They literally don’t make ‘um like that any more.

Pretty scary that you were allowed to do that, where I am in the world if you take your driving test in an automatic car you only get an automatic licence, but if you take it in a manual car you can drive manual and automatic

I learned after buying my first car too. I bought a car from my uncle in Mississippi and had to get it home to Austin. It was rough through Louisiana, but I had it down by the time I hit Texas.

Did the same thing. I bought a 944 Turbo and had to learn manual while driving it home. And that thing had a clutch like a refrigerator truck.

I've taught around a dozen folks how to drive stick, and I finally found a method that reliably worked to make it "click" more quickly. When they get in the car, I tell them to forget about the gas and brake pedals and pretend the only pedal that exists is the clutch.

In first gear, I have them release it slowly until the car starts going, then have them push it in until the car rolls to a stop. Take breaks, explain what the clutch is doing. Repeat until they start getting bored.

Then introduce the brake pedal. Tada! You can stop more quickly now.

Finally, the gas pedal. You can push it until the engine shrieks in protest! If only there were a way to get it to quiet down but still keep your speed....

Of course, you need a very large, very flat surface for this method to work. But I've had a lot more success since starting to do it this way.

This is basically how I taught my son to drive a manual. I used a low-torque Toyota Corolla with a 5-speed manual. I found a large, flat area—a mega-church parking lot—and, in first gear, told him he can do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn't touch the throttle. He quickly discovered the point at which the clutch bit—began to engage—and learned to get the car rolling without killing the engine.

After an hour or so, he had mastered the engaging the clutch and I began to add the next steps. A couple sessions and he had the whole thing down.

Eventually I taught him how to double-clutch, rev-match when downshifting, and even how to float the shift with no clutch at all.

Today he owns a manual trans performance car (Z06) and has a great fondness for manuals.

Heel-and-toe: a totally lost art. Not comfortable or even possible in a lot of cars.

It's honestly not really necessary unless you're on the track.

I will say I blip rev-match downshift on the street almost all the time, that's definitely useful for smooth driving in most scenarios.

I hope every manual driver does this. Forcing your clutch to rev match for you on every downshift seems like unnecessary wear. Plus it's so satisfying to just give a little blip and slip it in.

And fun to practice getting them just right on the street anyway. It's something to do, if nothing else.

My first car was a manual, but my parents never taught me about rev matching (probably didn't know themselves), so I had no idea. (This was in the 90s, before the modern internet!) Drove for years like that, until stumbling upon this "heel toe" thing online about 15 years ago. So I started just practicing on the street every time I drove. Which ended up being awesome, because around 5 years I got into track days, autocross, and time attack, and it ended up being an extremely useful skill. Once the muscle memory's there, it's almost easier on the track than on the street since you're deeper into the brakes. (Good on the street too though, to make your clutch last though.)

what do you guys mean by "blip"? I'm not familiar with that term.

it means, in this context, to tap the accelerator (gas) pedal briefly to increase engine rpm's.

With the clutch pedal pressed to match RPMs on a downshift.

A quick stab of the accelerator to get the revs up to match the gear you're shifting into. The closer your "blip" gets your engine rpm into the right range for the gear you're shifting into, the smoother your shift will be.

On most cars I drove it's possible to toe and toe. So it's not a lost art, and many performance oriented drivers learn it, though it's certainly not necessary on daily basis.

I had a very old BMW once, and the pedals were close enough that you could brake and blip with different sides of your foot, not really heel and toe.

This is correct. "Left bit of your right foot and right bit of your right foot."

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/top-gear-advice/top-gears-g...

Yes - that's what I meant by "Toe and Toe" :)

Most modern cars I do different sides of my top foot rather than heel and toe.

Mandatory reference to the Audi unintended acceleration, probably caused by the brake and accelerator being closer together than naive drivers expected.

[0]: https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/history/the-audi-500-un...

> Eventually I taught him how to double-clutch, rev-match when downshifting, and even how to float the shift with no clutch at all.

Most of these things are unnecessary and damaging to a synchronised manual. They aren't saving wear on any part of the transmission. About the only useful application of changing gear without using the clutch when the clutch cable fails.

Unless you are in a manual American truck or a very old British one (the European trucks had synchros). Those are rapidly going to automated transmissions these days in any case.

First gear and reverse are occasionally unsynchronized on old cars. And should you ever get into a Trabant: in 4th gear you get no engine brake, it's freewheeling!

I originally said modern manual car but that felt like an oxymoron.

That's common on cars with 2-stroke engines that are lubricated by oil in the fuel (like a chainsaw). If you don't freewheel it, there's not enough oil coming through the fuel system to lubricate the engine properly.

Old Saabs with 2-stroke engines were like that too.

As I understand it, matching revs makes for smoother shifting and reduces wear on the clutch plate. It also prevents a weight transfer from shifting, which is why Nissan did it in software on the 370Z. If you're about to fling a car into a corner, it behooves you to not upset the balance by shifting carelessly. Again, AIUI. I don't track anything.

Double-clutching reduces the speed difference between the shafts that the synchros have to absorb, thereby reducing wear. It also lets you shift faster on track, or at all in a car with cranky synchros.

The '86 BRAT I used to own was very leisurely about the 3-2 downshift without double clutching, and downright lethargic from 2-1. If you wanted to be ready to pull away from a stop sign promptly, double clutching it into 1st as you rolled to a stop was necessary.

I can see shifting without the clutch adding wear to the synchros, but I've definitely had to do that too when the clutch went out on the '76 TR6 I used to own. Which admittedly had a very forgiving transmission, thank goodness.

Meanwhile, I haven't put enough miles in our '47 CJ-2A to master a smooth 2-1 downshift without grinding the gears, even with double clutching. That promises to take some practice. Practice that'll have to wait until the steering is sorted well enough to get it inspected, plated, and get it up to 3rd on a paved road. 2nd gets it moving quite quickly enough, thank you very much.

Rereading this before posting makes it sound like I've owned only terrible cars. I assert that they have character, and that's what matters. And only the BRAT was a daily driver. Apart from it, my daily drivers have all been pretty reliable and sensible cars.

Rev match, double-clutch, float, are all a part of the art of a manual, necessary or not. They're fun.

Done correctly, I seriously doubt any are any more damaging to a synchronized manual than regular old shifting.

Floating gears in a synchronized manual is just abusing the synchronizers as a clutch, if you get it right it's only a few rpm but why risk it? There is literally no advantage.

Race car gearboxes like crashboxes and unsynchronized sequential gearboxes have stronger gear dogs with more backlash (bigger gaps between the dogs) to allow them to be shifted without synchronization.

Double clutching is pointless. Just putting more wear on the throwout bearing.

I have been doing all these horribly, scandalously abusive things all my life and have yet to replace a manual gearbox or have a throwout bearing fail prematurely (or at all).

floating doesn't even involve the synchro's unless you mismatch the rpm.

there's no practical advantage, but it's not abuse either unless done very poorly. it's just fun to practice.

anyway, if you just double clutch 1/2 the time and float the rest, your net throw-out bearing wear would be the same. ;-)

What is this myth? Double clutching saves your synchros and takes the load off of them. Try it with any manual and you can feel much less effort shifting.

The only thing it's doing is doubling the wear on the throw out bearing and clutch linkages. I've seen taxis with 300k miles on their 3rd clutch but never having any gearbox components changed.

Not that wikipedia is the end-all, be-all authority on double-clutching.

"While double clutching is not necessary in a vehicle that has a synchronized manual transmission, the technique can be advantageous for smoothly upshifting in order to accelerate and, when done correctly, it prevents wear on the synchronizers which normally equalize transmission input and output speeds to allow downshifting."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_clutching_(technique)

This is true, the gearbox almost sucks the next gear in. I often do it when taking first gear while rolling at a low speed.

I taught that in case of cable failure.

Knowing what can happen and what one can do is important!

Same goes for no brakes! What are the options?

Downshift

Turn engine off. (Deffo practice that one)

Emergency brake.

Take exit, side road, shoulder...

Controlled crash.

That last one saved me. Was in a '73 beetle on a racing slot type freeway and boom! No brakes and about 20 seconds before I arrived at what would be a wall of cars. No exits. No e-break.

Shit!

I ground the car to a stop. Literally. Downshifted, then engine off, then ease it into the wall...

Scary and it trashed a nice beetle, but slamming into the other cars was gonna be way worse.

Good ideas.

Watching the tach is pretty unintuitive for someone who's never driven one, too.

Yep, this "just start with the clutch pedal" method was how I was taught 35 years ago and it's how I just taught my neighbor's 17yo last year. I've taken my 16yo son out a couple times as well, but he honestly isn't all that into it.

I guess if your engine has enough torque you can get going in first with zero additional throttle... But having driven some serious clunkers myself, a lot of small engines cannot even get the vehicle going without adding a little throttle while letting out the clutch, and just stall.

On level ground? If you could push the car, you ought to be able to get it started rolling without throttle. You just have to be willing to be abusive in slipping the clutch, which is fine for the short time you'll do while learning.

I had an 85 Honda Prelude and 88 Honda CRX and they both needed a little gas when you let off the clutch from a standstill or they’d die. My 2000 Miata could make it, but it would lurch and complain loudly.

To be clear, you don't let the clutch out for this exercise, that would indeed cause lurching or stalling.

The idea is to very slowly feather it in and out at the edge of friction to transmit just enough power to slowly get going smoothly.

I have an 88 CRX, it can easily get going with clutch alone.

Mine was the “HF” model, which I think had less horsepower than the base or “Si” models. Could have been the difference?

It would seem more likely that you just don’t ride the clutch (usually a good thing).

If you let it out fast you’d get a lurch, but letting it out as slowly as you can and sacrificing a bit of clutch would surely get the car moving slowly, whatever the power. Though if it isn’t flat, it wouldn’t work. More power or heavier flywheel would probably help.

In the old days, the idle was only controlled by a simple mechanical adjustment which lets through a fixed amount of air, which means the engine makes a roughly fixed amount of power. When you let out the clutch, the revs would drop a lot, each stroke would get more air so the torque would come up some, but it's fundamentally an open-loop system and didn't do a great job when tested like this.

Newer cars have better engine computers which have made this a lot easier. In a modern engine the computer controls the idle air supply. It also can control the ignition timing, which provides very fast feedback. Between those, if you're careful feathering, the revs will drop a bit at first but the ECU will quickly bring on some more power to compensate.

> I guess if your engine has enough torque you can get going in first with zero additional throttle...

An engine with lots of torque at idle is actually the worst for this learning exercise as it makes it too easy.

Any small 4 cylinder that I've had the chance to drive can easily get going without throttle if you're careful enough with the clutch play. Of course it makes no sense to drive like this for real but as an exercise in learning how to feather the clutch, it's great.

Yup this is basically how I was taught by my instructor in the Netherlands

This is how I learned (via the Matt Farah videos on YouTube), basically. Just go somewhere quiet and flat and learn to get moving in first with just slipping the clutch. You should be able to feather it enough until you have sufficient momentum that you can ease off of it without ever using the gas, and bingo, you're in first gear. Not only is it fantastic for learning how to get into first, but it helps you learn your car's clutch bite point, which makes shifting into other gears even easier.

I still had a horrible first drive from the dealer to the house, probably stalled 20 times (lots of small hills in Daly City, near SF) and annoyed some drivers behind me, but it worked out in the end.

That was a good video recommendation.

I have a question. Let’s say you’re riding in 4th and need to come to a quick stop. Do you press the brake pedal in and downshift to 3rd then 2nd then 1st quickly? Or do you press the brake pedal and the clutch in and eventually shift into first once you’re able to resume normal driving?

It's fun to do the former, but "quick stop" is not a good description (unless you're really quick)!

Depends on situation.

If it's a quick stop then usually I'll just slow down and then clutch in and shift to neutral as the car stops. Then I shift into 1st. Sometimes this transition happens quickly, such as if it's red long enough that I'll be slowing to 5mph or less or it's red, then turns green right as I'm slowed to about 5mph. Just depends on the intersection, traffic, etc.

If I'm slowing down to a red light that I know is about to change, or traffic is about to move, then yeah, I'll rev match downshift through the gears. I never really go into first in this case though, because my car's manual transmission is tuned such that you almost never need first except when you're going into motion from a complete stop; so I'd just downshift to 2nd or 3rd depending on the speed of traffic.

Thanks! My experience driving manual is entirely from sim racing where I use sequential shifting with an auto blip. For that, I row through the gears until I’m down in the appropriate gear. I need to get my hands on a manual car to practice a bit more.

Your muscle memory makes you push both brake and clutch at the same time, the brake slightly ahead. In a real emergency braking stalling your engine would be the last worry.

Ah new cars! Back in the day you need some gas or it is going to stall on clutch-only driving.

This is essentially how the MSF beginner motorcycle course introduces the manual transmission.

I was shown that way basically. Works well in my view. Just need some room.

Another way to understand a clutch is to have someone drive a motorcycle (or better yet an ATV with four wheels, they don't tip over).

Motorcycles are easier to manage since you have a dedicated clutch appendage and two options for activating the brakes.

Your left foot is dedicated to the clutch in a car

I wonder if there's a kind of collective background general knowledge that has dissipated as auto has become more common? What prompts this is just that no-one I knew had any great difficulty with clutch & gears when I learned to drive (early '80's). Autos (in rural UK) were pretty rare, and everyone before starting to drive had at least a vague idea of how to use the controls, and at least a majority of the boys had a rough idea of the underlying mechanisms.

I lived on a country road and learned when I was 12 by stealing my mother's car (a Fiat 500) before she got home from work. Two or three goes and I was away. Admittedly concentrating on the clutch I did forget to steer and went off-road a couple of times.

So much emphasis on thinking about gear changes does seem a bit unfamiliar to me - but it could just be since my first driving experience was also manual, I was learning all this in the background while my main focus was trying not to hit anything.

Never did anything as exciting as you but I do feel like maybe being a passenger for so many years gives you an ear for when a gear change is needed, and you hear "sorry, wrong gear" and feel the lack of acceleration or whatever. As for /why/, I just imagined cycling up a hill.

Good point on cycling. I think it honed my intuition about gear changes too. I even had a Raleigh Chopper for a while. It sported an actual gear stick centred on the frame. I thought it the coolest thing anyone had ever sat on.

It's actually to the point now that I've heard people say, seriously, "the way to be sure your car is never stolen is to get a manual transmission."

Have heard the same recently. Seems crazy, but there really are large numbers of people unable to drive manual.

Rented a car in the EU and it was manual! In the US it is always automatic, unless it is a sport or special rental...

Coming from the UK, I had never even driven an auto until I moved to Australia. It's more of a mix here, though most people can still drive manuals. Having been out of the UK for over a decade, I imagine things have changed back there by now.

I enjoy driving manuals, but I don't think it's worth being attached to. ICEs are a crude and inefficient technology, and are inevitably going to disappear outside of a few limited niches. Few electric cars are ever likely to have manual gearboxes.

As a more frequent motorcyclist than driver, I'm not going to miss riding behind stinky vehicles, diesel 4WD's in particular (not that I'm usually behind them for long).

Well, the ICE will be around quite some time yet. Electric cars are viable for many now, even superior for growing numbers, but inadequate for many too.

I could potentially use one for my normal car drive. My truck uses are a different matter.

To really put the ICE down will require a much better battery scenario. Replacements are coming due for early owners soon. As that painful discussion plays out, so will better fuels for ICE tech.

I too look forward to the day when the ICE is just not a thing. I see that being a while yet.

And that continues to mean teaching young ones to drive manual.

I live in Europe where driving stick was the norm until the arrival of hybrid and electrical cars. I have predominantly driven stick, and only recently driven an automatic hybrid car. From a comfort point of view I do prefer an automatic, although some petrol heads may keep preferring driving stick. However, I suspect it will become a niche within a generation.

I lived in Europe and I'm back for few months. Automatic rental car costs 2x of normal, so naturally I'm driving stick. I absolutely hate it. It's an absolutely ridiculous bullshit that needs to go (together with ICE's). I firmly believe the only reason stick is still being sold is so that rental companies could gauge their customers.

Damn, wait till you get on mountain bike, it has not one but TWO sticks that shift separate gears.

And TWO brakes, one for each wheel ? How it is even possible for human to have that much coordination to rein in that monster ?!

If you're really being precise about your gears, a shift-up or -down can involve both wheels. I never do that, though.

Most modern MTB's have abandoned a front shifter and only have one for the cogs in the rear.

How about a horse then…

I mean I’m taking my kids to daycare. Not focusing on lanes, speed, gears, rpm’s makes lets me focus more on road, traffic and cars ahead. Why people insist being a Luddite on even most frivolous things is a virtue?

I think it's a cultural thing. We Europeans are just more used to driving manual transmission vehicles.

Manual is niche in Norway now. The manual sale is close to zero. And you will have problems selling your old manual car. This shift started before EV’s took over the new car market. But it’s not that many years since manual were completely normal. Point is that preferences changes quickly.

I drove older bmw 3 series (e46) for more than decade with manual. Loved it, defended it, it simply gives you much more control over car and onnetion with it, helps you to be split-second precise when ie you need to accelerate hard to get to desired revs. No common automatic transmission works as well on ICE cars. But I reall it took me quite some time to get really good with it,, half a second makes a lot of difference. Then you switch cars ie for vacation and you are almost beginner again since so many changes re pedals resistance, timings, engine torque curves etc change across brands.

Then the car broke down last year and we went for bmw 5 series, which you can't even buy in manual (just to be clear I would never pay full price for these otherwise great cars, rather 20-25% for ca 6 years old).

Its so much easier especially for longer driving. My mental load decreased by up to 50%, with also the help of laser projection of speed, limits and navigation on dashboard. With 2 small kids, having a car thats too sporty is actually a major drawback anyway (so ie Tesla's 0-100 times leave me uninterested, why would one do this to your closest ones), unless driver self-centered a-hole. With family in mind, I wouldn't go back. Sport mode makes it already more agile than I (and rest of family) want, basically 0 lag on gas pedal.

I had a summer internship where I got bored and read wikipedia a lot. Reading about engines and transmissions there helped me a lot when I learned to drive stick. Being able to visualize what was mechanically happening gave me a little bit better intuition about what to do. I still stalled, of course, but I felt like I had a better roadmap on how to improve.

It's also worth noting that you can skip gears. For example going straight from two to four and then six when accelerating hard. It depends on the car, engine size/power, conditions, gradient and a few other things. Same when changing down. I'm personally a fan of using the gearbox to decelerate rather than just the brake.

I'm currently rocking a 20 year old Nissan Micra "Twister" with an auto gearbox - a proper granddad car (I am as it turns out). It weighs about two kilos and has about 2 BHP but it is a bit of a Q ship. I've seen off some expensive cars at roundabouts with some local knowledge a careful choice of lane and a stomp on power when it counts. It does make some odd noises when turning right (a CV boot is quite fucked). Lane one on a roundabout is often quicker than lane two due to less curvature, unless you can transition from lane two to one to straighten it out.

An auto always has some drive engaged so a standing start is often quicker but in a manual you can stomp on the accelerator and run up say 4000 RPM and give your clutch a good old work out whilst using the brake to hold in place. If you have enough power, you can start off in second or ideally you have one of those flappy paddle jobs and stay in first for about a half second and then change up as you go.

I prefer a manual box - you feel more engaged with the vehicle but then an auto can also be played with too. You can make it change up and down when you get the hang of it by blipping the throttle and getting to know what it wants to do in certain circumstances.

I love the feel of going straight from 2-4 on a car with a really tight shifting pattern. Used to drive my dad’s MGB a lot and boy was that car technically a mess, but the shift from 2-4 on an open country road was magic. As long as you didn’t think too much about the missing 5th gear, the useless seatbelts, or the reverse lights that only came on when they felt like it.

My old Alfa reliably engages the reverse lights, but often at the cost of shorting out the instrument cluster

"or the reverse lights that only came on when they felt like it."

Quality engineering 8)

Are you really talking about a MG MGB? Mind you, your final para. description fits what the Morris Garage churned out back in the day.

I went to school in Abingdon (Oxon) which is where the MG sort of wobbled onto the roads originally.

I haven't seen a MGB for a while but I have driven a Midget a few times (I'm 52). My dad had a Midget back in the day after his Austin 7 passed away (it cost him £5) and the Midget was what he was driving when courting my mum. Apparently they had to use her tights to replace the fan belt when it failed (yeah, whatevs).

I was probably the result ...

Yes, amazing fun car to drive, we had one in racing green (with ugly black front trim instead of chrome, but still a great car.) Lucas Industries did all the electronics, same people who (apparently) did them for British fighter planes. The engine was a miracle and the acceleration was beautiful.

The electrical system, though... at one point my dad couldn't pass the state inspections due to the reverse lights and multiple garages were unable to diagnose the problem. So he rigged a switch under the steering wheel to turn them on manually.

I have had multiple manual cars and do not understand what you mean when you say you enjoy a 2-4-6 shift when driving hard. I skip gears when I’m driving slow and some cars, like the Corvette, have gates to force a 1 -> 4 under a certain RPM.

IMO, the best part of a manual performance car is chirping tires (or fully breaking them loose!) on a 2nd to 3rd shift in a turbo car with no-lift-shift.

You can also not skip gears when downshifting, aka heel and toe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heel-and-toe_shifting

Yep, it's typically how I get up to speed if I'm driving my girlfriends car. NA6 Miatas had no power stock, so a nice full pot through 1, 2, and 3 then up in to 5th will get me to ~50-60 mph and in to cruising revs.

Nitpicking: in modern car gearboxes the actual gears (cogs) are always engaged, and the grinding noise is made by parts that are sort of designed to take it.

If you grind them a lot they'll still fail, but until they do there's no degradation to the way the gears mesh and transfer power.

I learned first on a dirt bike (13). I didn’t drive a stick until I was 19 for a delivery job but it was trial by fire at that point. I had to drive a stick to work my shift.

I drove one later, 25-32. It was fine, I don’t miss stop and go traffic with a stick shift.

> I don’t miss stop and go traffic with a stick shift.

I wanted in my heart of hearts to get a manual version of my car (a mini) but i talked myself out of it after getting stuck in a traffic jam for 2 hours in a rental.

The automatic still has paddle shifters so you can kind of drive it like a manual.

I like stop and go with manual, any time it's not a strong uphill. Somehow I find it easier to go in and out of neutral, as well as going directly to second, with the stick. I guess it technically should be possible with an automatic too, though.

Is there any value in learning how to use the electronic manual override option some automatics have?

I assume those are there only for fun. Not much different than driving a manual transmission these days.

I have found it useful for driving in hill country (to avoid having to ride the brakes downhill) but beyond that I'm not sure there's much practical benefit. I used to think you could downshift to buy you more time to coast to a stop without having to touch the brake and save some gas, but I think even using the brakes is enough to get a modern car to cutoff fuel flow.

If you're getting into motorcycling, it's not a bad way to start practicing with it since the electronic override is often like most motorcycle's sequential gear shift.

I sometimes use it in town because modern automatics want to upshift very aggresively to maximize fuel economy. That means the engine is almost lugging most of the time, which isn't really good for it. So I'll use the manual mode to keep the car in a gear that results in a slightly higher engine RPM.

It's not like a real manual though, there's no tactile feedback to changing gears or knowing what gear you're in by the position of the shifter, so I don't use it all the time.

I use it exclusively to downshift when I need more power, quickly. It allows me to drive in ECO mode to save gas, while avoiding sluggish downshifts by doing it manually.

Useful if you need to tow a trailer. Otherwise it's just a novelty.

If you're going to teach your spouse how to drive a stick shift, just go ahead and have a marriage therapist on speed dial

Don't teach family members stick shift. Save yourself the headache, and point them to driving school.

I agree, my aunt got old very cheap car for me and my cousin to learn how to drive, we had one 30 minute session of yelling and I never drove it again.

I cycled a lot before I learnt to drive. The concept of gears was very firmly in my head by then - all I had to do was learn to good clutch control. If a wrong gear means you are pedalling too fast or too slow, you get the idea very quickly.

This whole stick shift thing is funny, whole generations learned driving stick in Europe from day 1. Up to the point where using an automatic feels strange for the first couple of kilometers.

Not just Europe, anywhere in the world that isn't US

I love to drive manual transmissions, and taught my kids how to drive them.

My last stick car (I'm between cars right now) was a WRX STi. I was teaching my son how to drive it when he made an unfortunate 3rd-gear-to-2nd (while looking for 4th). It was quite an experience.

Luckily, no damage done to car or people. Just a great story for telling later.

Lucky it was a story and not a money shift!

You just expressed how I did car competency with my kids.

The best was snow!

Tip for parents who are teaching snow driving in a front wheel drive vehicle: get the car moving and set the emergency brake. The rear tires will lock and the rear end will be all over the place. Pick a wide road with a forgiving shoulder.

They will have to counter steer and keep the front of the car under control. Later, trigger a slide with that brake (assuming your car has one you can use that way) and watch them handle it like a champ!

We had a good time frankly. Drove an older, manual car. Minor damage was not a big deal. Made the whole experience nice, reasonably relaxed, fun.

As a european it is always weird to catch glimpses of the stick shift vs. automatic topic. Not because I can't imagine what it's like to not have the ability to drive stick, but because it seems like some kind of heated, ideological debate in the US, and I do not know why. It seems to me as if it is either treated as an arcane art, something to be shunned, a trait of "masculinity", or a trait of toxicity and pretentiousness.

Automatic is very much the minority here and almost everyone learns to drive on stick, even if they switch to automatic later.

While I won't deny that people like that exist here as well, not once have I encountered someone personally or in the form of a news article (in my native language) with strong opinions on the matter.

Edit: when I say "here" I mean my home country, not trying to speak for all of Europe of course

Europe is wide continent. For example, in Finland most new cars sold are automatic. Hybrids and EVs make big portion of sales (even a majority) and are of course automatic, but it has been a longer trend.

In the UK auto vs. stick felt like the ideological debate you mentioned.

Myself having done 10y consecutively of both, auto is a better experience overall. Except when you need that bit of immediate power from smaller engines. This is for my normal A to B driving, I don’t race.

I hate stick shifts and, born and raised and living in the eu, I have always driven automatic. The interesting comments I get ‘for not being a man’ (as an almost 2m, 100kg hairy bloke) in different countries, is always perplexing. And that’s over the past 30 years since I have been driving. Especially brits think (and say) I am a total wanker for not driving stick. But the dutch (my birth country) have similar emotions.

To me it really depends on the vehicle. I love stick but I do not want to drive a large fully loaded diesel truck through 2 hours city traffic.

> Automatic is very much the minority here and almost everyone learns to drive on stick, even if they switch to automatic later.

In Norway there's been discussions about phasing out teaching stick as standard - partly because of demand, partly because driving schools need to upgrade their fleets, and want to avoid the need for two sets of cars.

Unless my experience is very atypical, far from it being controversial, for most Americans it is a non-issue - they literally never contemplate it, any more than they wonder if there is a case for bringing back manual ignition advance.

Outside of USA does anyone else drive automatic? Curious.

I have been living in the US my entire life and the extent of the debate I’ve heard here is:

- Someone makes a joke about how you should get a manual, that way nobody will steal it (because the thieves won’t know how to drive), and

- Someone makes a comment about how they visited the UK and decided to rent a car, and either they paid extra for an automatic or they saved money and drove manual.

> It seems to me as if it is either treated as an arcane art, something to be shunned, a trait of "masculinity", or a trait of toxicity and pretentiousness.

I have no idea why you sense this from American culture.

> I have no idea why you sense this from American culture.

The internet. And it applies to much more than this

You know that in your local social circle very few people have opinions about such trivial topics and you rightly see those with strong opinions as weirdos

But then you go on the internet and something in our monkey brain makes it hard to remember that comments on a thread are not a representative sample. Which is very bad because the kind of people who take the effort to comment on an internet thread are also the kind of people who have weirdly strong opinions one way or another

And because negative opinions are much more likely to be expressed than positive ones you end up basing your model of some other place (the US for europeans, europe for americans, other countries and so on) on samples which over represents the most toxic and negative opinions

My wife and I both have historically driven stick shifts here in the US. Initially for budget reasons, since they are of course cheaper.

These days they are harder to find, and that means you have to pay the "automatic tax" on many models. So I would be frustrated to lose the option.

Our current car, a Volkswagen GTI, still has a stick, but it does seem like it could be our last. Even some valets do not know how to park the thing!

In Russia, you choose which one you learn and take your exam on. If you choose automatic, it's marked on your license and you can only drive automatic. But if you choose manual, you can drive either.

All car sharing cars are automatic, but other than that, it's really a matter of taste and/or budget. Some people buy manual cars because they're cheaper. Russian-made cars are almost all manual-only, and are cheaper than imported ones.

I got my license on manual, and... I just don't drive lol. Mainly because almost everywhere I go it's easier, cheaper, and sometimes faster to get there on public transit or taxi.

For context, I'm British. Until relatively recently automatics were so rare you'd often see an actual sticker on the back of the car warning the driving style would be somewhat different (e.g. braking on downhill stretches).

The vast majority of the cars on our roads in the UK are still manual, but the tide is changing and not just with the introduction of EVs. There exists a legal quirk whereby you're not licensed to drive a manual car if you've passed your driving test in an automatic. Until that legislation is updated, I expect there to remain a strong demand for manual transmissions amongst learner and new drivers.

Personally, I'm of an age where simplicity and convenience are valued more in my life. Parallels include choosing Apple devices where I'd previously been all-in on Windows, Linux and Android; consoles over gaming PCs; and I'd also include home automation despite the initial set-up. Both our family cars are currently (non-EV for now) automatics and I can't see myself or my partner ever voluntarily going back to manual cars. I can push a single button to start, select drive and go. Even the handbrake is automatic.

Anecdotally, my social group is very much of the same mindset. Increased traffic on our small island has all but removed any romantic idealism around driving a sporty manual car on an open road. Now that driving here is more of a chore than a pleasure, anything that helps ease the burden is going to become the default.

> the driving style would be somewhat different

Another difference I think is that with the stick, driver needs to be more prepared for moments to come on the road. Like you know that you are going to shift when you see the change in terrain ahead of you and so on. While with automatic this awareness is not required so you can expect the driver without stick to make more sudden changes. Of course not a rule.

FYI: almost everyone learning to drive in Norway now does so with automatic and as such get a license for automatic only. Guess the same will happen in the UK pretty quick.

What about the cost factor? In the UK manuals are still significantly cheaper than automatics.

I haven’t checked. They are barely sold anymore. In 2020 ca 95% of cars sold were automatic (or electric). You can still get manual used and probably cheaper than used automatic because no one wants manual anymore (except some petrol heads and old people that don’t want to learn to drive automatic).

There's still a big demand for manuals here, not just from petrolheads either. They're popular generally but in particular with newly qualified drivers, and people who live in urban areas and drive only infrequently. They're just cheaper and more economical.

That being said it is shifting (haha) slowly- I think in the last couple of years the majority of new cars sold have been automatic. But most people buy used anyway so manual is going to be around for a long time yet.

What is significant? A few thousand dollars?

In my anecdotal sample the thinking is changing indeed from "I'll learn manual just in case I ever need it" to "screw it, automatic is available everywhere, and EVs are coming".

In Iceland—until recently—there wasn’t even an option to take the driving test—nor the required driving lessons—on an automatic. You had to take it on a manual. Also most people bought a manual as their first car (as manuals were always cheaper and more available). However among my age some (wealthier) people bought automatic as their first car, and promptly forgot how to drive a manual. It is rear, but I’ve met a couple of people that simply don’t know how to drive a manual (as if they were American) even though they took the driving test and lessons on one a decade and a half ago.

EDIT: Unrelated, but there is also a common myth in Iceland that manual transmission is illegal in San Francisco. I have no idea where it comes from, but after having lived in SF and returning to Iceland I’ve had more then one people ask me about this. (I even owned a manual 4-speed VW bus [known as VW Ryebread in Iceland] while living there).

That describes me.

I passed my test in a manual car in Britain, but I never bought a car. I've rented them when abroad, and have an account with the pay-per-minute electric cars, but at this point I don't want to drive a manual if there's an automatic available.

I'm UK based and still drive a manual. The main reason being cost. I'm a super infrequent driver (maybe once a week for bulky shops or long weekend trips) and don't want to be paying through the nose for something that is a convenience not an essential. I drive a second hand 2013 Toyota aygo which was super cheap, is zero rated for road tax, incredibly reliable and ultra fuel efficient.

I'd be willing to bet I'm quite representative of other city based drivers who have the option of public transport, walking or cycling. That's why I don't see the demand for manual dropping any time soon.

> Until relatively recently automatics were so rare you'd often see an actual sticker on the back of the car

How recent do you mean? I know you get manufacturer brands like "5.1 GTI Automatic" on the back, but I can't remember ever seeing a warning sticker.

> Currently, manual cars still account for 70 per cent of the 31.7 million cars on UK's roads [1]

so it must have been a fair while ago.

[1] https://www.directlinegroup.co.uk/en/news/brand-news/2022/th...

You know what, I believe you're right. On reflection it's more like 15-20 years since I've seen one. Apologies for the bad phrasing.

No problem. Back then, I was usually in the back seat :)

What a load of nonsense. The manual gearbox for sports cars died around 2010-ish. Before you protest that you can still buy manual sports cars, hear me out.

The manual gearbox you can buy in any sports car today has obscenely long ratios. Partly this is common sense - almost every sports car for sale today is turbocharged, you don’t need a close ratio box. The other reason if emissions, long gone are the days of the top gear being long, with standardised emission test cycles that have prolonged driving periods at town speeds, now all gears are optimised for lower revs.

It’s not uncommon to find you only need 2nd gear for anything from 30 to 80, i.e. the speeds you’ll spend most of your time on a nice set of twisties.

Why 2010? That’s when the borg warner DSGs broke into the mainstream. No human can match their efficiency nor their shift speed. The only remaining reason in sportscars is for driver engagement. Since then the traditional slushbox auto has caught up, i have a ZF in one of my cars and it’s every bit as fast and just as smooth changing as the DSG in my last VAG.

Yup. I love my manual E46, but I'll be the first to admit that modern paddle shifters are better for everything other than vibe, basically.

Well their examples pointing to the utility of manual transmissions on EVs include:

- A car with a two-speed automatic transmission

- A concept with fake shifting and a fake clutch

- A modded classic car where the first two gears are admittedly not very useful

I don't think those speak well towards manual transmissions continuing to exist in the EV world, at least in the sense that enthusiasts would want them to.

I totally get the disdain for torque-converter automatic transmissions, but an EV drivetrain avoids basically all of the downsides that people have come to expect from an automatic.

This sounds like they’re making the opposite of the point they tried to make. None of those seems remotely useful.

As an EV driver I’m baffled as to why anyone would want manual. The only real advantages afaik in ICE are better torque control and engine braking, both of which don’t make any sense in an EV. Maybe in an incredibly wimpy EV

> The only real advantages afaik in ICE are better torque control and engine braking

I'd argue the majority of manual fans are into them not for any utilitarian reason, rather it's all about the enjoyment that comes from controlling a fun (i.e interesting powerband, characterful sound) engine with a satisfying shifter. Think of it like playing a musical instrument.

I highly doubt manuals will catch on for EVs because the electric motors are super smooth and their torque makes gears irrelevant (the Porsche Taycan being an outlier here).

Learning stick is like learning algebra. Once you get over the stigma "gee, algebra is hard" it's no problem.

For example, a friend of mine taught remedial algebra at the U of W. She'd write on the board:

    2 + x = 5

and ask the students what the value of "x" was. They all fell over into a quivering heap of jelly at the word "x". Then she'd write:

    2 + _ = 5

and ask them to "fill in the blank". They all instantly said "3".

This is a great example of how understanding the problem is the way to to the solution.

Then I make my kiddos prove that it's 3. That's the place where understanding comes in: understanding that algebra is operations on the equation as a whole, and not just divining the correct answer.

I love driving stick and I've done so with all my cars...but I'm okay seeing it go. I'd prefer the options to be more environmental, and there are other joys in life. It's not good to be attached to such things.

Seems like a nicely balanced perspective. I don't drive much, but when I do, I much prefer 'manual' (translation of 'stick' to non-US English), and take pleasure in smooth heel-and-toe changes. I'm mostly a motorcyclist and similarly enjoy getting better at smooth braking with changing down and rev-matching.

But if electric motorbikes become usable and affordable to me within my lifetime, they will offer different pleasures (ubiquitous torque, quiet). And outside of driving/riding, there will be enough pleasures to experience and skills to learn for many lifetimes.

It's really stupid, but you can't tell me that the idea of a manual electric doesn't appeal to the less rational parts of your subconscious.

It doesn't.

Driving ICE manual is the whole package. Engine sound, the manual interaction, the little jerk when you miss the rev on shift, feeling of all the mechanics when changing the gear, feeling the vibrations thru the chassis when you accelerate, engine going braaaaAAAAAP and screaming like angry bees when going past VTEC threshold etc.

And the little details like how the notch on the first gear in my Civic ('07 Type-R) becomes lighter when the gearbox oil heats up and the whole rest of smaller idiosyncrasies of mechanical system.

For me the fun is man understanding and controlling machine, it is gone the moment machine pretends it's something it isn't. Not saying electric wouldn't be fun, just that I hope it will be its own type of fun instead of fake.

My car is a bit raw tho, spins to 8.6k RPM and have pretty hard suspension. Typical ICE car isn't exactly that "talkative" and is much more mushier around the edges.

But it is a bit funny to me that if you want high revving NA engine your options are 15+ years old Hondas or top of the line Porsche...

I’ve driven stick lots of my life and no it doesn’t. You press the pedal on electric and the smooth instant and seemingly endless application of power is one of the absolute best parts of it.

Don’t leave out the old Volkswagens! 7.5k on the tach on my 2.0 16v, very commonly pushed into mid 8s if you end up going to solid lifters and a set of cams.

I agree though, nothing quite like a small 4 banger revving the moon.

It would be like those CVTs with fake shifts: unnecessary, phony, dishonest, and worse than actually embracing the technology and using it properly.

If you want to feel "connected" to a modern car you are out of luck. It won't happen. Adding fakeness to compensate is ultimately unsatisfying.

> you can't tell me that the idea of a manual electric doesn't appeal to the less rational parts of your subconscious.

I can absolutely tell you that. It sounds stupid and burdensome.

And in terms of effectiveness, it's basically homeopathy, or healing candles.

I haven't driven stick in years, having bought a DSG car, but I still prefer 'driving one-handed' the way you do with a stick shift, and it's clear at this point that some people don't remember being passengers in a manual transmission vehicle, let alone driving them.

I recently switched from 10 years of driving stick/standard to an EV and the sensation of instant power dwarfs the fun of selecting gear for me. I might just still be in the honeymoon phase, and I barely drive preferring to bike around everywhere instead. But having ample power in every situation from highway acceleration to hill roads pretty much obsoletes everything I used the stick for. I guess I do miss the habit of clutching and heel-toeing but with an EV I get all the benefits with none of the fiddliness. This was not the case when driving anything but the top automatics.

Yup. Three pedals to one (plus what’s effectively an emergency break). I miss shifting at times, but the overall experience is much better.

I've had an EV since 2016, and I'm a huge manual fan, but the things I like about manual are almost without exception already there in an EV. What really grinds my gears, so to speak, with an auto trans is being in the wrong gear for what's coming up, say when waiting for an opening to overtake.

As you say, the EV has smooth, instant power available all the time, and good "engine breaking". The only thing it's missing is the nostalgia of winding through the gears and the symphony of the engine, exhaust, and drivetrain. But the smooth, powerful acceleration, is there in the EV.

I feel just the same, with the proviso that I want a mechanical backup for catastrophic software bugs - a fully mechanical drive disengagement, aka shift to neutral. And the emergency, aka parking, brake should have no software mediation either, beyond sensors that signal software to "do the right thing" (park or neutral) with the drive. I haven't started looking at EVs, but one will probably be my next car when my current (stick) irreparably fails.

It's definitely going. When I learnt to drive in the UK 15 years ago automatic cars were completely non existent (if you pass your driving test in an automatic in the UK you are only allowed to drive automatics - so everyone does manual, which allows you to drive both).

Fast forward 15 years and I'm surprised when I see a stick shift car - primarily (very) old taxis/ubers.

That's pretty surprising to me. Where I am at least half of the cars in the street are 15-20 year old bangers that are almost all manual.

I don't doubt that if you live in particular parts of London or the South East, you could see 90% fairly new vehicles with automatic gears or EVs. (Certainly not all of London, but if you live or work in one area you're less likely to walk down residential roads in other areas.)

It's probably partly because disposable income is higher in London, but also because those with less money have better alternatives (good public transport) so don't own a car, or own one but don't use it much.

> 62.4% of new cars sold in 2021 were automatics, up from 24% in 2011 [1]

> A number of car makers offer only automatic gearboxes across their ranges, with no models from Mercedes, Genesis, Ferrari, Jaguar, Lexus, Maserati, Rolls-Royce, Subaru and Volvo being available with manual transmissions.

[1] https://www.carwow.co.uk/news/6414/automatic-gearboxes-becom...

Sorry, what I meant it's very rare to see a newish car that is manual. Old cars are manual of course. It was pretty unheard of to get an automatic new car 20 years ago.

Ah yeah, fair enough, that makes a lot of sense and I agree.

Here I feel like most of the new cars I notice are either automatic or EVs too :)

Manuals are still ubiquitous where I am in the UK so I don't agree with that assessment. They are still vastly cheaper than automatics as well.

I've accepted they have to go, and haven't had a manual daily driver in about ten years now. So I don't feel the need to have a manual option when I inevitably switch to an EV. But I also have a few classic cars that I can take out whenever I've got the itch. I suspect I'll keep a manual 'toy' car around until I'm too old to drive it.

Shifting an EV seems like a gimmick, with not much of a gain, and no substantial consequence for poor technique. A real reason, posted earlier today, is people strongly preferring that experience of manually controlling a complex mechanism, and being unwilling to give it up. I sure won't.

EV Sales Sticking Point: People Still Want Manual Transmissions (hackaday.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33661154

I'v recently figured I'd rather drive ICE than an EV without radar cruise control. Stick shift EV fucks both ways!

Similarly I'd rather drive car with a shitty capacitive steering wheel buttons (gosh they suck so bad) over car without keyless entry...

A manual EV can make sense. A normal stick is just a torque modifier. If we have a "stick" that limits torque of an EV, with this we can limit the way torque is delivered in each gear, with this the experience of such drive can be similar.

If you want to artificially limit torque, sure. But it generally isn't necessary.

The only attempts at production EVs with multiple gears have targeted two gears, one for acceleration and one for increase top speed above 100mph for racing or Autobahn cruising.

That's not going to give drivers the "thrill" of a manual transmission.

If what you are seeking is the direct-drive feel of a manual transmission, and shifting to be in the strong part of the power curve for each situation, an EV does all of that just by pressing the accelerator.

The Taycan shifts into second at 62mph. Seems it's not just for racing, it's also an efficient freeway cruising gear loosely comparable to overdrive on ICEs.

And I imagine even the single-gear EVs have a final drive. What if that ratio were adjusted to be shorter?

If the Taycan didn't have two gears, they would have optimized for efficiency at 70mph, with a compromise of decent (not crazy) acceleration below that speed and a falloff of acceleration power over 100mph.

Since it has two gears, they were able to make one shorter for acceleration and another taller for top speed.

Tesla does something similar but by using different motor types and final drive ratios on each axle.

If you gear an EV for highway speeds with a single final drive ratio, (this is what most EVs do) then you get acceleration better than most midrange gas cars, good highway efficiency, but acceleration power tends to fall off at speeds over 80mph-100mph.

The reason to add gears is if you want even better acceleration and/or better high speed performance.

The base-level Teslas only have a single motor. If it's geared for highway speeds, I imagine it's less efficient in the city than it could be with another gear.

Does max power output correlate with efficiency in EV motors? I know it doesn't in ICEs.

The efficiency and power curves are much broader for EVs than ICEs. The RWD Tesla Model 3 is one of the more efficient EVs on the market altogether even with a single motor and single speed. But it suffers in acceleration compared to dual motor models which use a less efficient (but higher low-speed torque) induction motor with a shorter gear ratio on the front axle to boost traction and acceleration.

Think of it this way, if the Taycan were to drop one of its gears they would drop the low gear, not the high gear. The car would still accelerate better than most midrange ICE cars and still do fine on the highway. It just wouldn't have the off-the-line punch you expect from a high end performance EV.

If you chop the low gears out of an ICE transmission you either just stall or have extremely poor acceleration at low speeds.

So yes gearing can help in an EV if you want high performance over a large range of speeds, but for a city or highway commuter car, even chasing sportier characteristics, single speed (per axle) is fine. If you want two ratios for overlapping performance you can just change the fixed reduction ratio on one of the axles.

The Taycan is specifically targeting a range of performance beyond what you'll use daily on US public roads.

This is also a good summary with links to some power curves:

https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/yohycz/wh...

And some more here https://x-engineer.org/ev-design-electric-motor/

Basically EVs have such a flat power curve to such high RPMs that a single speed really does cover most use cases. Two speeds can help if you are chasing performance.

Any more gears than that and I think you are just adding an artificial game for the driver to play.

It'd also lose energy to the gearbox, would weigh more (more energy loss), and would cost more. It's not obvious that the efficiency would be improved.

I have an anecdote to offer: in the early 2000s I was learning to drive in a former comunist country. Most cars were Dacia 1310, a copy of 1970s Renaults. The stick was awful, the steering was very heavy (as in lifting weights heavy), the clutch was terrible. It was very difficult to drive one, let alone learn to drive one. Newer and better cars were just beginning to appear, but there were few of these and they were expensive. There were two lines of thought in my circle: (1) that you should learn on a Dacia, because then you will be able to drive anything and (2) you should learn on a modern car, because it is easier. Needless to say, camp (2) won: the Dacias all but disappeared and furthermore, newer cars are mostly automatic.

So I wouldn't hold my breath that the manual gear shift will survive.

> the steering was very heavy (as in lifting weights heavy)

The 1310 didn't have power steering :)

But it can be worse. You could try driving a 2 ton Mercedes with non functional power steering. That's a sweat inducing task.

Anyway, with no power steering you have to keep the car moving at a snail's pace when turning the wheel. No adjusting wheels in place if you're not up to date with your weight lifting. This skill got lost before the skill to drive a manual.

as a heavy diesel mechanic the only application i can see is heavy trucks. current slushbox automatics in the latest series of long hauler over the road rigs is absolutely useless on grade and costs triple to replace and service compared to existing manuals. you dont want an unprovoked shift in the rain or snow when youre dragging forty tons.

Even those can likely be replaced with hybrids, after all a locomotive pulls a lot more (900,000 tons of steel according to the poet, but I think he's off a bit) and you can't build a transmission for that.

i think youre right and i think the market will adjust, but the current application is just trying to take what works on local and regional beer haulers and ups vans and scale it up. very myopic and leads to a lot of frustration when logistics companies realize their drivers arent qualified to leave the state with bigger loads because they never learned stick

I think this is why is would take off in trunks; probably anything that hauls.

As the article states in the article, there is no engine to stall. This is more like vehicles with D, D1, D2. It's optional efficiency.

For an electric vehicle, switching between them doesn't stall the vehicle, but it could be used to increase distance between charges.

According to a random internet search, the average "semi truck" age is 11 years.

So even if all brand-new trucks starting TODAY were fully electric with an electric/nonshifting drivetrain, it'd take 11-22 years to "clear out" the existing.

For a large country that's true, but regulations could adjust that. If you want to drive a truck into a city in Scandinavia or Germany, there's a good chance it needs to be newer.

For example, to drive into Copenhagen a truck or bus must be from 2015 or later, or there's a €1700 fine. (https://urbanaccessregulations.eu/ has a list/map.)

If you have a truck that's too old, you might have use for it elsewhere in Denmark, or you could sell it to someone who will drive it somewhere without these regulations and sell it there (i.e. eastern, southeastern Europe, Turkey, north Africa).

There's a diagram that would be excellent if it weren't fuzzy on page 5 (Figure 2) demonstrating this nicely. It's not at all unusual to see a truck in Romania or Bulgaria which has the shadow of some German company logo/name on it, where the logos have been removed.

https://www.acea.auto/figure/average-age-of-eu-vehicle-fleet...

(Are there any similar rules in North America? I can see restrictions on new vehicles sold in California, but nothing on what you can drive in.)

Well, you can, but the history of locomotives with gearshifts is not a happy one. British Rail in the 1950s had a Diesel road locomotive (not just a railcar) with a manual transmission. The shifting was powered, but not automatic. Hitachi has built some switching locomotives with geared transmissions and a really big 12-plate clutch.

But no, you don't want to do that.

> really big 12-plate clutch

Here's a video showing a multi-plate clutch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcYsV063lk8

Only being familiar with simple car transmissions, wow! That's a lot of friction.

Key concept seems to be, for some pressure force, you get N times the friction force.

Yes. For locomotives, the big problem is 0 to 0.1mph time. It's like 13 speed tractor-trailer transmissions, only worse. The fun version of this.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-1EZ6K7bpQ

EV heavy duty trucks transmissions are 2-4 gears due to the high torque band. ICE vehicle engines must maintain a minimum idle speed and so a torque converter has to be used to match speed. But EV engines can run just fine at 1 RPM, so the vehicle can easily start from a dead stop in first gear automatically. Just put it in gear and press the accelerator.

EV doesn't need "gear" in the first place, engine can be directly connected at all times.

There are some EVs that have 2 speed gear box to get max of the performance out of the engine but that's almost exclusively for performance vehicles.

EV heavy duty trucks are also high performance vehicle.

Single-gear EVs are significantly less efficient at freeway speeds. They can benefit from a second gear, but it seems this isn't considered worth the extra cost.

An ICE car doesn't "need" more than one gear either, but it would be extremely inefficient with just 1. More gears means lower torque and power required at sustained load and speed. Hence why most EV truck transmissions (light, medium and heavy duty) have more than one gear.

EVs don't have engines. They have motors.

I imagine - like with the allegory of mechanical Swiss watches - the manual transmission will see a resurgence of sorts, but not in an EV. I think both ICE and MT will go together hand-in-hand as enthusiast vehicles for weekend drives, home mechanics, or the track. I think slushbox ICE is dead but the combination of MT and ICE will survive as a niche but thriving luxury/enthusiast purchase.

I'd guess the same. People still ride horses, there will be ICE cars. I suspect the Mazda Miata or some similar roadster may by the last ice cars?

This is why classic cars are going up in value, even cars from the 90s.

People know cars like those will never be made again, and quite a few people who grew up with 90s cars are now old enough to have the disposable income to buy them.

Ultimately new gas cars will be banned. Many governments have already expressed the desire to ban them. That is one of the major differences from the mechanical watch market -- but even in that market, values of vintage watches are going absolutely nuts. In the car market, vintage cars will be the only ICE cars one day.

If you have spare garage space, one of the best things you can do is buy an older unmodified sportscar that had a good reputation in the 1980s or 1990s, hold onto it for 10 years, and sell it for a massive profit. Something like a 911, or Supra, or MR2, or maybe even a Miata.

I think the market for this will be very small.

Electric sports cars will have better performance, and be familiar to everyone in a few years. Won't most people want a car they can also drive to work?

I can imagine it will be like a neighbour who owned a very old (1930s?) car. Maintaining it was a hobby, and actually driving it on public roads was something he did only a few times a year.

Italy wanted an exception to the EU regulation banning ICE sales after 2035 for their supercar industry (Ferrari etc) but only managed a 12 month extension to 2036. After that only manufacturers making less than 1000 vehicles a year can continue to make ICE cars.

That's probably the size of the market I am thinking will remain. I would love to see a thriving motorsport industry catering to track sports and hill climbs, and then we can happily get rid of ICE cars from our cities.

If all I can do with my petrol car is drive it to the track and for special events, I think I would be content enough. I don't need the thrill of the sights and sounds of racing on my commutes, and I believe motorsport is the only exception that isn't trivial.

Nah. The sports car market has long relied on cross-subsidy from mass market vehicles.

Ferrari was dying until Fiat bought it. Lamborghini would have died without Audi. Porsche would have died multiple times without VW - and relied on VW components throughout its entire history. American sports and muscle cars were made by the Big Three, and used V8s made for other vehicles.

Without that investment, it will be impossible for sports car makers to make vehicles that meet contemporary roadworthiness standards.

Not to mention that you won’t be able to sell them in the EU, California, New York, and China beyond 2035. Doesn’t leave much of a market.

Maybe there will be a residual business selling ICE sports cars to Middle Eastern plutocrats in 2035, but those plutocrats may have more urgent things on their minds given the long-term demand for oil and gas is headed one way.

I have always seemed to get better mileage out of a stick than a CV or automatic and definitely performance that matches my desires, like engine braking on a downhill. But it really only pertains to a combustion engine. A stick on a EV seems like a rotary dial on my smart phone.

But was the rotary ever fun to use?

It definitely was.

Try saying that when using it in real life, making many calls daily, with an exchange such as 908-.

Then, the tone dialer appears.

I was not interested in interacting with my telephone. I just wanted it to place calls.

The question was about FUN, not about making many calls daily.

What a strange response. The point is, repetitive usage shows the difference between fun, or just novel.

A rotary phone could be novel. Yet it became tedious with common use, especially when compared to tone dialing.

My grandparents had a rotary phone and I always thought it was fun/neat to play around with (they'd unplug it first, obviously). I was about 8 years old when they got rid of it so no idea if it's still "fun" to an adult.

I can very much see it as fun, when it is unusual.

It isn't fun as a daily driver.

I've had a rotary phone for about 5 years, but always a voip line and most ATAs don't handle pulse dialing well (some of mine say they can, but it doesn't work with my particular phone anyway), but I recently setup a real POTS line and it works there. It's kind of fun, but mandatory 1+ ten digit dialing makes it a lot more tedious. Even if you were somewhere without ten digit dialing, there's a lot more cross area code dialing these days.

When 1-800- numbers were introduced, they were tedious to dial. You could see why NYC was 212, Chicago 312, LA 213, and so on. Yes, I was around for all that. I envied the houses with touch-tone.

That's interesting. I'd assumed the USA would use the letters on the phone dial, since those are still used in advertising today but have fallen out of use in many other countries.

In Britain, the area codes were originally allocated based on the letter corresponding to the number, except for London.

  01_ London
  021 Birmingham (B=2)
  031 Edinburgh (E=3)
  041 Glasgow (G=4)
  051 Liverpool (L=5)
  061 Manchester (M=6)

with other cities taking two-letter codes:

  0532 Leeds (LE = 53)
  0742 Sheffield (SH = 74)
  ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_telephone_numbers_i... (impressively long article)

US area codes are a fixed three digits and initially had a rule that states which fit in a single area code would be X0Y, and those with multiple would be X1Y.

When the area codes were made, AT&T already had usage data from operator connected long distance calling, so they chose the numbers to minimize dialing time.

Within area codes, the first three digits indicate the telephone exchange, those used to be named based on the first two digits ex 555 KLondike-5 or 736 PEnnsylvania 6 [1]; these exchange names historically tended to have geographic meaning on a local level, but that wasn't always practical and when customer dialing happened, exchange names mostly disappeared, only to be heard from in older media.

[1] you might know of this one from the Glenn Miller song, PEnnsylvania 6-5000, which was the number of a the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York; it's exchange was named for PEnn station, the area the exchange serves

RX-7, RX-8... oh, wait

It was great for scrolling.

Its basically petrol heads who prefer manual transmissions, I doubt any of them have economy in mind, I have a manual transmission on my hilux EV conversion unless I'm going uphill or have a big load it stays in 3rd from start to finish

Yep. I love my manual 90s Skyline, but I am really hoping to get a pragmatic commuter EV after driving a couple. I will not miss the gearbox for that task.

I also think EVs tick a couple of boxes that manual gearboxes also do for enthusiasts, which slushbox autos didn't. Always being in a good powerband and engine braking are both features of EVs and manual gearbox ICE cars that I miss if I am in an auto ICE car.

In the UK manuals are still significantly cheaper, so the bottom end of the market prefers them as well as the petrol heads

It's not really a preference if it's only what you can afford. People who only buy second-hand cars will naturally end up with whatever was new 5 years ago, which will gradually include more automatic ICE cars, hybrids and EVs.

not 100% disputing what you're saying and im sure more automatics/EVs etc will gradually filter in. BUT it's not just an affordability thing lots of people just prefer cheaper cars and would prefer to put their disposable income elsewhere.

Preferring to put your disposable income elsewhere sounds exactly like an affordability thing.

If I have £15,000 in the bank, spending £8,000 on the manual vs. £9,500 on the automatic (Renault Clio, 5 years, both on motors.co.uk) is significant. I'd choose the cheaper car.

If I have £50,000 in the bank it's much easier to justify.

(And if I have only £8,000 or less I don't have a choice, but I might tell my friends I "prefer" not to put a lot of money in the car.)

There is absolutely a good reason for transmissions in an electric vehicle, it's just that most EVs elect to remove them for simplicity instead.

I will leave the interpretation of this graph as an exercise for the reader.

https://i.stack.imgur.com/HRUva.gif

I predict we'll end up with AWD vehicles with two motors. The front wheels will have a motor tuned for the low end, the rear wheels a motor that is tuned for higher speeds, and the controllers will adjust how much power goes front or rear depending on the need for torque, traction and mph.

Right now AWD EVs seem to get slightly lower range, and I would expect that to eventually to even out or reverse, even with the weight of extra equipment.

Some (not all) non-performance AWD Teslas do exactly this. As early as 2014, when they intro'd the S 85D, the front and rear motors were set up so one would be more used at low speeds, for better acceleration, and one at high speeds, for more efficient cruising.

This is how my Model S 70D is setup. The front motor is a somewhat smaller than the rear.

Most EVs don't use permanent magnet motors. Try again. The curve you linked is seriously misleading.

Like just look at any EV dyno curve, it is not "torque starts at top and immediately starts falling"

Transmission means extra losses and extra weight tho. It's not just "free" increase in efficiency.

It does make sense but in typical city/reasonable highway speed it's just not worth it

That is a strangely aggressive response - I'm not claiming every single ev is pmac but many are. What sort of motor do you think a Tesla model 3 uses, for example?

Even considering that, induction motors also have an efficiency curve which is the point I'm making. If you care about efficiency motors have a sweet spot. Sometimes you care a lot about that, sometimes not.

> What sort of motor do you think a Tesla model 3 uses, for example?

IPM-SynRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUb7Zy5Oio

They went into a lot of effort to optimize it over RPM range.

If you want to make a point use real motor curves at least. Your graph suggests it goes to sub 20% efficiencies at low speed which is completely false and would suggests way higher gains from gearbox than in reality. Hell, it would suggest ICE like performance, it's THAT bad.

Manual transmissions are more efficient than automatic because there is more energy lost to unproductive sloshing in the torque converter in the automatic, whereas the manual has a clutch that makes a near-lossless linkage. Nowadays, I'm sure we could software-automate a mechanically manual transmission to have the same driver experience as an automatic...

It’s already a thing, but was widely derided by both manual and automatic proponents (for different reasons): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_manual_transmission

I have one of those in my '06 Maserati. It's a pain in the ass in some ways, but it's still more fun than automatic.

> Nowadays, I'm sure we could software-automate a mechanically manual transmission to have the same driver experience as an automatic...

Paddle-shifters and CVTs, right?

This was true decades ago when the dominant automatic transmission was torque-converter junk. This hasn't been the case for some time now, though. The modern automatic transmission (e.g, Porsche's PDK, or any the DCTs, or even the ZF8) will win every time.

Driving a manual is pretty much only for feel or technique at this point, there's no real argument otherwise.

Can you clutch start a modern auto? I've clutch started a manual more often than I can count.

When I was young an dumb I drove a car with a dead starter to work and back for a week. I'd bump start it by pushing it up to the crown of the street.

I think a classic automatic transmission needs hydraulic pressure to engage the bands. And since the gear pump is on the input shaft side it doesn't run when the car is pushed or towed.

"The old Model A had a spark advance you could manipulate. I don't know why they got rid of it. Well, that's your Detroit smarties. The hand choke too. That's gone. Been gone." - Charles Portis, The Dog of the South, 1979

You can't even clutch start some modern manuals.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought "automatic transmission" refers to one with a torque converter, and DCT is its own thing.

They're lumped together under "automatic transmission" insofar as the industry goes, however yes - the DCT is very different under the hood.

In this case, though, an automatic transmission is - for all intents and purposes - a transmission that does not require the driver to handle shifting at all. The DCT fits in this category.

> Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought "automatic transmission" refers to one with a torque converter, and DCT is its own thing.

AT is "the car changes gears".

Sometimes a distinction is made between AMT and others because AMT is kinda shit, but both DCT and torque are AT.

Also modern torque converters have lock-up clutches, meaning once they've switched gear they've got the same direct-coupling efficiency as a DCT. The ZF8 mentioned by Klonoar is a torque converter.

>The ZF8 mentioned by Klonoar is a torque converter.

Ha, you're right! I don't have the energy to go edit my parent comment but hopefully it's clear (or at least, now) that I meant old school vs modern AT transmissions.

Thanks for the correction!

I don't drive any of those cars. Very few people do.

Well, no - when it comes to the modern manual transmission, we're now mostly discussing these kinds of cars. The manual is rare (and moreso by the year) in just about every other segment.

That really depends on the brand of car / transmission.

Modern cars with the ZF-8 (which is like the number 1 automatic sold currently) are more efficient than their manual counterparts.

Extremely recent example in the USA: https://www.toyota.com/grsupra/2023/features/mpg/2385/2374

Toyota 3.0 Premium MT (6-speed Manual): 19/27/21 Toyota 3.0 Premium AT (8-speed Automatic): 23/31/26

And if you're like: Oh, the EPA's measurement sucks, here's the WLTP counterpart:

3.0 Petrol Twin-scroll turbocharger (335 BHP), 6-speed Manual: 32mpg / 198 g/km CO2 3.0 Petrol Twin-scroll turbocharger (335 BHP), 8-speed Automatic: 34.8mpg / 183 g/km CO2

Automatic has better mpg and less CO2 per distance travelled.

some of that (the highway rating especially) is gearing, the final drive is shorter and the 6th gear in the ZF manual is not nearly as tall as the 8th in the 8HP. This is a common issue in auto vs manual MPG comparisons these days

Well, I should test drive each. EPA standard and reality don't match. For my stick shift cars, I always beat the EPA mileage.

Yes?

EPA is a standardised regime so cars can be compared. You can drive better than the EPA (or WLTP) test, especially if you're in better conditions.

From what I have seen, VAG DCT models tend to be invariably less efficient than their MT counterparts (and I don't know why ZF-8 would be more efficient than a DCT).

I do wonder how much of this depends on the driving style, though.

In a manual I think you're much more likely to rev out the engine more, shift higher in the rev range, etc.

In an automatic unless you're in full "manual" mode and using the paddles/shifter to emulate that same style, then you're more likely to have the automatic's efficiency.

It's the difference in 8 speed and 5-6. Though the automatic still has some loss in a torque converter.

Historical higher mpg in a manual 5 and 6 speeds is due to driving style, 1st, the driver is more likely to drive based on what's ahead; 2nd (and related) the manual driver is likely more conservative in everyday driving.

The ZF-8 has a lock up clutch. That's why it's so efficient. It uses the torque converter as a pump to match the speeds but then engages that clutch to have a 1-1 connection. No losses.

This idea is outdated by about ~5-8 years. You’re unlikely to match the efficiency of a CVT with a 5 or 6 speed manual.

When I learned to drive a stick I did it for fun as an adult and taught myself on a beater car.

After thinking about it a bit before getting behind the wheel for the first time, I simply imagined the clutch as a "lock" on a shared resource. Either the engine or the stick have access to the state of the gearbox, but not both at the same time.

I did witness my parents driving when I was much younger and recall them being very gentle and smooth without riding the clutch too much in 1st so I did the same. Surprisingly I didn't stall my very first attempt, but did as soon as I tried 2nd. Drove around for a bit on this dirt patch and even got it up to 3rd. Practiced downshifting from 3rd to 2nd and braking from neutral to a stop. Practiced lots of 1st gear starts because I was terrified of intersections on real roads with traffic.

So I finally get on the road and come to a stop at a rural intersection with an old man in an even older pickup truck. It's my turn to go... The whole car shakes violently from the worst stall I've ever made until then or since. The old man laughed his head off at me and then went on his way. The embarrassment was so intense I never really had a problem shifting since then.

I might be wrong, but I think this is how people used to learn and just kept it to themselves. :)

EVs were never the threat. Most gas-powered cars are moving in the same direction as EVs because that is where the industry in general has been going for a while: heavy emphasis on technology, apps, subscriptions, safety features like lane keep assist and automatic braking, and eventually self-driving features -- most of which is done in software, and the mechanical stuff is too complex and expensive for most non-experts to fix.

It might sound like I just described a Tesla, but a new gas-powered Volvo does all that stuff too.

I'm sure some people would like this but from a technical point of view it's of course a redundant technology in an EV.

The reason manufacturers might like this is because it perpetuates a business model of servicing and repairing these vehicles for them. More moving parts means more maintenance.

A lot of the business with ICE vehicles is in parts and maintenance. With EVs, the maintenance is mostly limited to changing the tires and topping up various fluids once in a while. So, the life time value of the vehicle is actually lower for them. You sell it once and then the owner is really happy with a vehicle that just keeps on going and generally has not a lot of need for regular servicing. Manual gears would be a way of artificially building in some contingencies for that and creating a need for more frequent opportunities for selling and servicing expensive parts.

Correct me I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that EV's like Tesla don't really have a transmission as in gears to change, so as much as I'm a diehard manual transmission fan I figured that was where it ends. Now a clutch pedal that simply allows the vehicle to coast with regenerative breaking disabled sounds like the best compromise to me.

if your only use case is to disengage the regen braking you should probably just have a regen braking disable function, a clutch is an awfully complicated way to achieve that. You could literally have a software 'clutch' pedal that did nothing other than disable the regen if that was your goal.

Although on the other hand the clutch does have a nice property, which is that it works regardless of the state of the control system of the vehicle. If my MCU decides it wants to accelerate me at 500 mph into a wall a hardware clutch would be a nice thing to have!

W.r.t gearboxes in EVs: there is definitely a reason to have a transmission in an EV, it's just that most manufacturers don't include one for simplicity .

https://i.stack.imgur.com/HRUva.gif

That's what I meant. One thing I appreciate about a manual transmission car with its clutch pedal is the ability to coast, not accelerating but not slowing down like regenerative braking would.

Agreed I want the ability to smoothly switch between coasting and different levels of regen in an EV. A clutch pedal would be a cool way to do it. I've imagined a large dial or lever where a shifter would normally be.

You're correct; Teslas (and most EVs) have a gear reduction but no ability to change any gears, since they don't really need to. Coasting comes by feathering the accelerator, similar to how you can slowly decelerate in a manual transmission.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsa-SxpiCU0 has Ken Block talking about how different driving a high performance EV is, though, since you have full wheel speed range without shifting. On one hand, you don't need to work a clutch to keep turbos spooled up; on the other, you have to be much more precise because you can't let the clutch slip for additional control.

In consumer EVs, though, the car won't really let your wheels slip.

So here's a crazy idea: Keep the third pedal, and have it adjust the sensitivity of the accelerator pedal.

While we're at it, put force feedback on gas pedal, when wheels start slipping make it gently push on the driver's feet so they can "feel" the grip.

Heh. Fortunately, there's already force feedback in how the car moves when the you start to lose grip.

If memory serves from the test drives, the new Hyundai/Kia electric vehicles (built on a common platform) have paddle shifters that only manage regenerative braking, similar to how you would use engine braking.

One of the subtler features of my DSG vehicle is that on most downhills it will automatically downshift to maintain speed. On a really steep hill it will start to race, but feathering the brake for 5-10 seconds will convince it to downshift once more. I haven't driven it in the mountains hardly ever, but that's one area where manuals often win out - no melted brake pads, no heat-warped calipers.

In fact I put way more miles on the first set of brake shoes on this car than I would have dreamed possible, to the point I started having mechanics check their records to make sure we didn't change them while it was in for something else.

Nice thing with EVs is that with regenerative breaking you barely use the brakes at all. When I hade mine in for regular service interval the mechanic told me to do some hard brakes from time to time to keep rust off the brakes!

> Nice thing with EVs is that with regenerative breaking you barely use the brakes at all.

Some cars have enough regen braking that you don't need the brakes at all except for emergency braking, though usually it's an opt-in mode. Look for something like "one-pedal" or "single-pedal". Sometimes it's a physical button with a foot (not) pressing a pedal.

> One of the subtler features of my DSG vehicle is that on most downhills it will automatically downshift to maintain speed. On a really steep hill it will start to race, but feathering the brake for 5-10 seconds will convince it to downshift once more. I haven't driven it in the mountains hardly ever, but that's one area where manuals often win out - no melted brake pads, no heat-warped calipers.

Can't you just tell the car to downshift using paddles, or force it into low gear using a gear limiter feature?

DSGs start at 6 gears and go up from there. Paddle shifters and DSG are also not synonymous. Mine and a few other more recent designs I’ve seen have a gearshift that looks like an automatic but it goes sideways into a gear selector. Many won’t use that mode.

Yes you could do this fully manual but you get more fleet efficiency if it’s automatic.

My point was that most (if possibly not all) ATs let you limit the gearing to use engine braking when going downhill.

Sounds like it would work fine for you if you but used it. “More fleet efficiency” is not a huge concern on downhills, you just switch back to the automatic regime when you’re at the bottom.

I have an automatic turbo Golf, and I loathe the transmission. It can take over a second between hitting the accelerator and getting some acceleration; if I'm at a stop sign, and the A/C is on, it can take almost two. (Yes, the turbo adds lag, but the transmission is the big problem.) I think a big part of the problem is that it usually starts in second gear for efficiency's sake, which adds time to switch to first when it decides I need it.

On the road, when I need some "ooomph", I need to carefully feather the accelerator; press it too much and the transmission panics and downshifts, adding a full second to the response.

There are shift paddles on the steering wheel which you'd think would give me the control I crave. But if I'm using the manual shifting and then press the accelerator down too far, the transmission decides I don't know what I'm doing and downshifts anyway.

I have yet to drive an electric; I'm looking forward to when my Golf goes belly-up.

Don't tell me it is a GTi - DSG or just plain auto ????.

VW has notoriously "squishy" accelerators, so much so that you can get a pedal tuner to try and make it more responsive. Our family Tiguan is like that and the auto box in it shifts like garbage, but not a bad car otherwise.

Whenever I encounter the "Robb Report" I am reminded of an occasion in college when some friends and I noticed one of its issues on the newsstand in a grocery store. It came in a special plastic bag with an opaque rectangle printed over most of the cover, presumably to obscure the luxury products advertised therein from proles like us, but by pulling the plastic away from the cover we could clearly see that it was dominated by an image of some kind of miniature recreational submarine.

Since then it has been difficult for me to take anything about the Robb Report seriously. Maybe that's unfair of me.

Anyway, it would be weird if the uber wealthy didn't keep the stick shift around in some form or other, but on EVs it will be nothing but an affectation, like the way modern "sport" luxury cars pipe fake engine noise into the cabin. Just another way for folks who have too much money to waste some more of it.

Sorry, but I do think this is unfair.

There are a lot of people out there who love the way engines sound, and the increased engagement that a manual transmission brings to the driving experience. They aren't all "folks who have too much money", and I really hope this experience continues to be available to those who don't.

There's no denying that cars with DCTs or EVs are faster and better on most metrics. But they are less fun for a lot of people.

I think you are misunderstanding me a little. My car has a manual transmission and driving it is (oddly enough, since it's not a very fast or powerful car) one of the greatest joys in my life. It's wonderful to be so "close to the metal".

My point here is that the products Robb Report is shilling are not going to provide this experience, much in the same way that the fake engine noise piped into the sound-deadened cabin of some midsize BMW pedestrian-killer doesn't reproduce the true music of a classic euro V8. A stick shift gizmo on an EV isn't going to move you in the same way because it isn't real. It's nothing but an affectation designed to appeal to the vanity of the wealthy.

I feel this might be an (north?) American issue. Where I come from the automatic is still in the minority. It feels weird driving a car without proper gears!

What do you mean by proper gears? Automatics have the same gears.

Gear stick, I'm in control of changing. I've driven both but in UK you're pretty much taught how to drive with what I'd call a proper vehicle interface. You can get automatic only tests but you're not allowed to drive any non-automatic car.

This went in a different direction than I'd guessed. As someone who still drives a manual transmission car in the US, my guess is that non-electric cars will eventually be a category for enthusiasts.

Those for whom a car is an appliance will gravitate towards increasingly cheap, subsidized, low-maintenance electrics, but there will probably always be a market for gas models for those who can afford them, and my guess is those will increasingly feature stick shifts since they're targeted at the enthusiast crowd.

#gaspunk

But probably some other fuel that burns cleaner without NOₓ/CO/CO₂ emissions, maybe hydrogen (no emissions at all) or ammonia (NOₓ only).

Hydrogen still produces NOx; it is purely the effect of high temperature on atmosphere, the higher temperature the worse it is; so it still needs catalyst and rest of the emission control clown car

> Enthusiasts

I'm skeptical that manufacturers will include manual transmissions in EVs that actual people can buy in the future, and this article doesn't really change my mind. Their examples are a $135k Porsche, a $265k custom Bronco, a patent somebody filed, and a concept vehicle. This feels like wishful thinking. Enthusiasts will always keep things "alive", but you could just as easily write an article about how enthusiasts have helped the typewriter survive the computer revolution.

For a long time there was a perception that Europeans are real drivers with their stick shifts and

"didn’t everyone in the world think that American people were babies—with their innocence, their Disney, their inability to drive a stick shift?" (Elif Batuman)

but maybe with EVs and modern automatic transmissions the day really has come to say goodbye to manual transmission. Our family cars have them and my daughter just bought a new manual Civic but not for any real rational reason.

No, the reality is that we were (and still are, though a bit less) poor compared to the Americans. I can afford myself a nice automatic car and it is a blessing for me, but most of my compatriots still can't.

In the low end models that I'd be willing to pay for, there is no price difference between stick and automatic in the U.S.

Modern automatic transmissions are kind of icky, IMHO. DSG is pretty good, except the car I had with one had a speed around 6 mph that was terribly jerky; other than that it was fine. My van has a 9 speed automatic that's awful though, routinely hard shifts around 25 mph, can't engine brake on downhills for anything, even in L.

Hybrid e-CVT is nice though, driving wise and engineering wise.

I'm a big fan of manual transmissions, but if it adds more things that need adjusting and that can break on an EV, I wouldn't want one on my next (electric) car.

My first manual car was an Alfa Romeo Milano (aka 75). It was the first thing I bought after graduating from university. The guy that sold it to me had it in service for sale. He taught me to drive on his new Milano 3.0L in a town north of the city. The lesson ended with him teaching me how to balance the car on an uphill incline by slipping the clutch.

I picked up my car a few days later and drove it home. I drove that car to its end, loved the high-compression V6 that would engine brake if you lifted the gas even a little.

Sometime much later, I bought my first motorcycle after taking a weekend riding course. The thing that was so hard to learn was doing the mechanical things I had learned but then adding the turn signals and watching for all the traffic was a lot of cognitive load and I took hours to go straight along one road that should've been a half hour.

> In 2020, that number was barely over one percent (or about 188,000 cars)—which might explain why only 18 percent of the country’s drivers even know how to operate one.

It also means less thieves who are able to steal my stick-shift car.

This comment makes me thankful to live in a place where somebody stealing my car isn't even in my top 100 concerns.

The newest stickshift I've driven was a 2018 with computer controlled suspension, fancy-smancy-brake/"torque vectoring" stuff, and optional revmatching on downshifts.

To be honest, with the rest of the car doing so much already to augment my driving skills (it responded beautifully, but it definitely wasn't my skill), the stick felt incredibly anachronistic.

That was the experience that made me OK with it going away in the future... It'll still be there on old cars, which are still a unique experience, but it's a bit off IMO on new ones.

When I was 16 in 1976, my father and grandfather taught me how to drive stick. I learned on a 1966 rambler classic four-door sedan with three on the column. Nowadays, that would be an anti-theft device. When I lived in the country, most of my cars were stick shift and when I lived in the city I preferred automatics - nothing like driving in heavy traffic, and everyone is driving first and a half. That’s just hard to synchronize with a stick shift. Current vehicle is a four-speed, and I don’t think I’d have anything else.

Yep. Drive a stick and you most likely won't lose your car in a carjacking either.

I don't have an EV, but I did give up manual transmission a year ago or so when my wife and I downsized to one car (the choice was between my 20 year old Subaru and her 5 year old Honda). Not much to say other than I miss driving manual, and am saddened thinking I might never get to again. I've considered buying a shitbox just to do so, but that seems wasteful. On that note, I miss driving shitboxes. Someone left a trolley in the parking space? Just drive into it.

BYD makes an electric car with a "manual transmission". It's for driving schools. The transmission is entirely faked with software, as are the engine sounds and the tachometer. You can even stall the simulated engine[1].

[1] https://jalopnik.com/this-chinese-electric-car-designed-for-...

I hope it has a giant vibration motor to emulate the lurch.

There is a diy EV conversion community where people sometimes leave the (mostly but not always manual) gearbox in place.

Usually they don’t bother fitting a clutch and most of the time they leave it in either 3rd, 4th or 5th gear. Shifting done either when standing or by relaxing tourque. Even reverse is done electrically but rotating the engine the other ways.

> Even reverse is done electrically but rotating the engine the other ways.

One of the fun things about most EVs is that they could accelerate just as fast in reverse, and hit the same top speed, as they could if they were driving forward. The only thing that prevents it is software.

For example, if it was not limited by software, a Model S Plaid could do 0-60 in reverse faster than any car in the world has ever done 0-60 going forward.

There is one nuance tho, specifically with the Model S (not sure about plaid).

The way the Model S motor is laid out, it is often more advantageous to fit it backwards into conversions.

This should be fine, except the motor driven oil pump is meant to run mostly forwards and long periods of running it the other way cause problems in oil flow and might cause pump failures too.

So there is a aftermarket oil pump that fixes this problem.

> Basically, first gear gives the Taycan more access to torque, allowing it to accelerate even quicker; second allows the motor spin at a lower speed while maintaining speed, thus improving efficiency.

That's what I never understood about EVs. Don't you gain some battery life (and thus range) by having a gearbox? Automatic or manual.

> Don't you gain some battery life (and thus range) by having a gearbox? Automatic or manual.

Yes, but that's traded for more weight (thus less range), as well as increased complexity and maintenance.

And at "normal" speeds, you gain very little efficiency, the second gear is for cruising on unlimited autobahn segments. At which point you're getting hosed by aerodynamics anyway.

If it was so valuable every EV manufacturer would use them, but that's not the case, if anything they're getting scaled back (e.g. the original Formula E had 5-speeds).

It's not the stick I want, it's the clutch. My car can be put from automatic to a manual mode, it's a gimmick.

What do you want the clutch for?

What would be nicer would be an electric 'dumb car'. Some of us want electric, but not all of the gimmickery.

That's starting to hit the market now I think, some offerings from Hyuandai and Nissan are just a normal modern car with an EV drivetrain.

The manual transmission may well be the best theft control device on the market.

But aren’t even so-called manuals actual drive by wire?

I think there is a mechanical linkage in almost all manual cars. For the steering there absolutely is, almost no cars are actually drive-by-wire in that sense. You probably won't be able to do anything with the car with no power though, because everything has electrically actuated mechanical lockouts, and the engine won't work because it uses an ECU.

In my 2003 manual you can reach under the hood, grab the lever on the transmission, and move the shift lever inside that way. Purely mechanical. Afaik, the computer doesn't even know what gear you are in (I don't think it even senses neutral.)

This is a great idea. I didn't teach my kid how to drive stick shift and I feel bad about it. My grandfather knew how to drive heavy trucks and tractors and use those skills in world war II, and I never thought about it but he didn't teach me how to do those things!

You haven't mastered stick until you can drive it smoother than an auto :-)

Some companies that don’t have much to offer (no supercharger network, no in-car connectivity, etc.) are adding skin deep gimmicks to their EVs. I suspect that’s the most fitting category for this.

Like a record player, if there’s demand, it’ll get built.

Will be pricey though.

I just wanna see racing ev's with straight cut dog boxes.

Audio Volume Warning. Turn sound way down.

https://youtu.be/dmJH84FnQa8

I used to really want one of those transmissions on my BRZ until I heard one in real life.

They are incredibly loud. I wouldn't want to be cruising down the highway at 70 mph with one of them.

I did hear that you can get transmissions that use straight-cut gears for the first 4 gears and then normal gears for the top 2, but eh...not worth how much it would cost just because I like the sound.

That's still going to need to have bearings supporting the shafts that are able to support thrust loading (when power is applied in either direction in one of the helical cut gearsets).

Biggest issue is clutch control and to get the bite point right without stalling - as it differs from cars.

Manual cars are cheaper.

I haven't owned a car of any sort in > 16 years, but driving stick is not something I'll ever forget.

I prefer stick but at the end of the day it is just a car so I do not care if it will disappeared.

In the process of electric swapping our 5-speed Baja. It will be keeping the manual gearbox.

An under-rated bonus of driving stick ... you are practically invulnerable to car theft.

I guess you mean in US.

I drive a manual Kia. Am I safe from the "kia boys"?

I just want to know this: Can a manual transmission give you any practical benefit in an EV? I think the torque bands of _current_ EVs are so wide that they can perform reasonably well without more than two gears, but could they compromise on that power band or change the final drive to create a faster or more efficient EV with 6 speeds?

If the answer is no, I'm not interested. I've already had enough fun with manual on cars where it mattered.

So far, Porsche has made the case for a two-speed EV, and not just when you're racing. Single-speed ones are less efficient at freeway speeds. But a two-speed manual transmission wouldn't be much fun. Maybe I missed it, but the article didn't explain what it's like to drive the five-speed EV Bronco. What happens when you shift gears?

For now.

Until all of the enthusiasts die out.

riding a horse will too

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