Car and Driver magazine launches campaign to save manual transmissions!

They won't make business sense anymore before too long. It sucks, but it's the truth.

They already don't make sense for some manufacturers. The only 2010 Mercedes-Benz you can have with a manual in the US is the SLK out of their 12 model lines on sale.
 
Not a problem for me. The rest of you that want to purchase a new vehicle with a manual in the not-so-distant-future better learn these:

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The fact of the matter is that between market preferences, performance demands, and ever tightening fuel economy laws, the true manual transmission car is unfortunately a dying breed. Manuals are unfortunately not as 'convenient' as an automatic, not as fast as a DSG-type transmission and are actually less fuel efficient in the all-important fuel economy tests than the newer automatics.

DSG has come to the motorcycle world, but it looks like it won't catch on and go widespread any time soon, due to the weight and complexity issues. So if you want a manual, you're going to need to learn to ride a motorcycle.

Even BMW is abandoning the manual - the last-gen M5 only had a manual because American dealers and customers (yes, AMERICANS) demanded that BMW make a manual or they'd go burn down the Munich HQ.
 
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I also think it's probably too late and the driver training theory doesn't seem too off, although I see it from another vantage point. I'm 30 years old. My father can drive a manual. My mother cannot (despite what she claims, she hasn't so much as sat behind the wheel of one in my entire lifetime). In my lifetime the only manual car my family has owned is the 69 MG. How many of your parents are proficient at it this? We all know that parents do the bulk of driver education in this country. If your parents cannot drive a manual or don't own one one, and we've seen 92.3% of them do not, how you learn to drive a manual? Magic? Don't give me this "go to the dealer and let the sales guy teach you." Come on. A considerable chunk of those sales guys can't do it either, not to mention if the very real probability the dealer doesn't even have one on the lot at all. And drivers' ed? I spent less than 30 minutes behind the wheel during the entire semester long high school course. What a joke.
 
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Manuals aren't hard to learn. My father rode shotgun with me for ~30 minutes my first time and that was it.
 
Manuals aren't hard to learn. My father rode shotgun with me for ~30 minutes my first time and that was it.

I dunno. I didn't think ballet was very hard to learn but perhaps you may feel otherwise? :p

Edit: The point isn't the absolute difficulty of the task, it's the number of available teachers and teaching machines.
 
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I have an ex-girlfriend and two ruined manual boxes that give the lie to that statement.

No, not everyone can drive a manual.
 
Most cars sold here are still manual transmission - automatics and double clutch configurations are relatively rare.
 
Yes, but all your mid-to-large size higher end cars are switching over - note the M5 above, for example. It's going to trickle down to the econoboxen and ecoboxen classes eventually, just like everything else.

In the end, sure, there might be a couple of ecoboxes left with manuals... but who the hell would actually want to drive something like a Proton Savvy or Rover CityRover, manual transmission or not?
 
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Paddles aren't that bad. Well, autos are, even if they have paddles. Drove a BMW with an auto with paddles, and it was still slushy and not that great.

But DSG is awesome. As fun as it is to row the gears, the sheer speed and ferocity of a full sport mode DSG shift is something else. And besides, you brake and corner better with DSG since there's no heel toe.

This one won't mind at all when manuals have gone the way of the dodo. A little sad, maybe, but the future is bright. We've still got at least a decade left for new manual cars anyway, and it's not like the used ones will vanish.
 
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From what i've read, germany has the highest market share of automatic transmissions in europe.
It's ten percent.
No need to panic.
 
I don't think were can save the proper gated shifted manual. Now the majority of cars will be auto tragics with a few sequential. It's sad and I truly despise the auto tragic but there's nothing we can do.


Buy a car with a manual trans is a start.
 
How many of your parents are proficient at it this?
My father is. Sure, he gave it up for about 15 years because of the vehicles he and my mother deemed necessary for raising a family didn't have manual transmissions at all - so as soon as his Diesel Escort died when I was a child, that was it for manuals until that family started to shrink again. Now the massive family yachts are all gone and it's back to God's transmission around here (well, out of 3 vehicles we have ONE manual, but we're working on it).

Problem is that his other siblings can't. They never cared to learn. And those siblings had far more children - children who now cannot drive stick. Even my siblings escaped learning it. Driving manual is passed down through familial lines - and as people become more and more detached from their cars, fewer people learn it. And thus it dies.
 
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After driving a manual equipped car for the last 3 months or so I can approve of it's positive advantages, I preferred automatics before because I never knew how efficiently a car could move with a standard transmission.
I used to think switching from reverse to forward would be obviously faster in an automatic (even counting shitty auto's 1.5 second waiting time for changes) until I got used to doing it myself, it's actually gentler on the car while also being faster and better on gas. And as an added bonus, I actually enjoy driving every single time I drive because I'm simply doing more of it.
Whenever I drive an automatic car now, I think about how easy one could be distracted while only having to press one or another pedal at a time, and I'll bet most single car crashes in N/A are automatic cars too because the people changing the gears themselves are more likely to be careful drivers that understand the physics behind a typical car.

That's all I can say for now as I've never driven a DSG/dual clutch vehicle before.
 
Even BMW is abandoning the manual - the last-gen M5 only had a manual because American dealers and customers (yes, AMERICANS) demanded that BMW make a manual or they'd go burn down the Munich HQ.
See, consumers CAN make a difference.

Oh, and you must be brain-dead if you cant learn to drive stick. Its not rocket science. When I learned, my friend took me around a parking lot for 10 minutes and then made me drive him downtown so he could get some food. It takes a bit of practice for it to become second nature, sure, but its not difficult.

I've only owned automatics (not really my fault here... long story) and has always had to find friends that wouldn't mind letting me practice on their cars, and yet I can drive around with a manual no problem - no stalling (I think I've only stalled once and only then because the 'box in my friend's crx was looser than a fat hooker and I thought I was in neutral when I wiggled my stick a few inches to each side... nope, it was still in first), no shaking/budging, etc. I shift slow and my downshifts take forever but I don't think you'd notice if you were driving behind me.
 
I find that discussion amusing.
In the total sales of new cars, automatics must be around 10% of news cars, and most of those in brands like Mercedes and BMW. The other, cheaper brands like GM, VW and FIAT don?t sell autos in the entry level cars because people don?t want to pay more for it.
 
Both of my parents can drive stick, my mom because of the clunkers she learned to drive in, and my dad because he owned many Corvettes over the years, all manual. However we have not had a manual car in the family since my dad sold his last 'vette in '93. Personally I can count on one hand the number of times I have been a passenger in a manual car, and have only attempted it myself once while test driving a Hyundai Tiburon (stupidly long clutch did not help).

My grandparents of course have no problem, having learned to drive a very long time ago. We're trying to convince my grandmother to get an S2000 since she is always ogling them :lol:

My point is that (most) people don't learn manual because they want to, but because that's what a car has. If your first car is not a manual you will see little reason to pick it up later unless you are an enthusiast.
 
Are you saying that it should be easier to get a license and car? :lmao:
No I am saying that they shouldn't make you do useless things that teaches you nothing and charge you for it. MAYBE they could add something like parallel parking to the lessons since I still can't do that properly without hitting the curb :|
Lynn Junk taught your driver's ed class too?
I have no idea what the old hags name was just remember she was evil.
 
I've only once driven a car without manual. And it was a DSG Golf R32. :|
 
My mom thought the invention of the automatic transmission was the greatest thing since sliced cheese. Yeeeeah, it's not--on both cars I've had, the slushbox inevitably ends up starting to commit transmission-seppuku and shifting really, really roughly all the time. Also, cheese is yummy.

...so guess what I never learned how to do? :(

I feel a bit bad that I gave one of my friends in high school crap for stalling his truck pretty much every time there were boobies around, but at least he got it over at the right age for that, y'know?

re: the "damn kids not learnin' how to drive, get off my lawn!" discussion--my best friend in high school was in auto shop. I wasn't. Guess which one of us didn't have a driver's license? Haha. (I think he finally fixed this problem in college.)

Shoot, I counted down the days 'til I could get a dadgummed permit, but I guess I'm a weirdo.
 
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