261–270 of 893 posts
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Number of hands on the steering wheel has nothing to do with reaction time.
No, but it determines how well you can steer. Especially in sharp turns you usually have to shift down/up. If there's an obstacle (perhaps a person), both hands on the wheel will give you more room to steer in both directions. You'll be much more limited with one hand.
First car was a Civic stick on San Francisco. I speak fluent stick. My last stick was a RAV4. I loved sticks but that was a terrible stick. Switched to a Mercedes C230K and I was instantly a better driver. Now I have a Leaf with a CVT. I don't miss sticks at all.
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Never experienced that but you have way more control in a manual excluding powerful electric cars. You need to stop fast, well you have gears to utilize quickly in a manual. Need a pop to get out of a sticky situation? Drop the gear to get in the power band and pull away. I don't understand your argument other than manuals being more error prone. Certainly you could stall it in an intersection if you aren't experienc…
Sure, but in a manual some percentage of my brain is always dedicated to thinking about which gear I'm in. In an automatic I have 100% attention on the road. And when I said "stop quickly" I meant "a person steps out on the road in front of you". Gears won't help you here, because I don't believe anyone can downshift in the 2 seconds left to impact - the best you can do is press the brake as hard as you can. The diff…
I can see it happening, and I've observed it with people who have learnt to drive on auto, but that's just a reflex problem due to inexperience.
If you're used to driving manual, just don't have to think about disengaging the clutch when braking hard, but you still do it, and you don't stall.
As for "pressing the throttle down and it drops as many gears as needed", in my experience it takes a noticeable amount of time until the car understands it has to drop gears. It's just not really rational to argue that an auto car gives you as much control as a manual.
I'm a car enthusiast, and I was a manual transmission purist for many, many years. But then I had to be honest with myself, and admit that the VAST majority of my driving is commuting in traffic. And that driving is much less annoying with an automatic. My leisure driving is maybe 5% less fun without a manual, but that's far outweighed by how much better my daily commute is. At this point, I'd only buy a manual for a…
I figured out that you can make manual driving as comfortable and carefree as automatic, but that type of driving typically wears on the clutch. For instance, you might just hold down the clutch in stop/go traffic if you don't know if you'll change gears or not. I was even pretty proficient at using my phone while driving with a manual but once again this involved a style of driving that wears out the clutch much quicker. The end result is you end up paying for a clutch replacement every 3-4 years which adds to the TCO of the car. After 7 years I'm switching back to an automatic and I don't think I'll miss my stick shift at all.
I got my driver's license in Sweden, and the official driving handbook completely worships manual transmissions, and makes several untrue claims about how much better they are than automatics. You can choose to do your road test in an automatic, but that'll earn you a restriction on your license, barring you from driving a manual. It's probably fair, but almost everyone (myself included) chooses to practice in manual…
I love driving a manual, but with the rise of CVT, what's the point?
Oh I hate CVT. I've got a Land Rover Discovery 3 with a non-CVT auto and it's as smooth as anything changing gear, you just don't notice. Looking at getting an auto for our second smaller car, and CVT is like someone has an elastic band on the gears. Would drive me up the wall. The Citroen box at least comes with paddles which helps. The VW/Audi dual clutch box is the best, you get the economy of CVT and it's so much…
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Sure, for professional racing drivers. The vast majority, certainly >90%, of people who claim to be driving more efficiently manually are simply mistaken. It's mostly observation bias. They recognize those two situations a day where they really have the upper hand. For a second or two. They don't realize that in most other driving situations they don't even come close.
> Sure, for professional racing drivers. But note that the transmission in F1 cars is semi-automatic [1] [1] https://www.formula1.com/en/championship/inside-f1/understan...
I got my driver's license in Sweden, and the official driving handbook completely worships manual transmissions, and makes several untrue claims about how much better they are than automatics. You can choose to do your road test in an automatic, but that'll earn you a restriction on your license, barring you from driving a manual. It's probably fair, but almost everyone (myself included) chooses to practice in manual…
>when automatic transmissions are consistently outperforming humans at fuel efficiency Do you have data to back this up? Unless you're driving a dual clutch "dry" transmission or a CVT, because of Physics, an automatic transmission will always be less efficient. The Automatic transmission Torque converter [1] will waste some of the energy provided by the engine, especially with city driving. Also, most automatic cars…
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> when automatic transmissions are consistently > outperforming humans at fuel efficiency What? So far each data sheet has shown higher fuel consumption for automatic vehicles.
Sure, for professional racing drivers. The vast majority, certainly >90%, of people who claim to be driving more efficiently manually are simply mistaken. It's mostly observation bias. They recognize those two situations a day where they really have the upper hand. For a second or two. They don't realize that in most other driving situations they don't even come close.
Day to day driving is wildly different from that, there are only very few situations where people come anywhere close to the maximum acceleration their car would offer. With manual transmission, you can attain submaximal acceleration by flooring the throttle in a low gear. This is much more fuel efficient than getting the same amount of acceleration with a throttled engine at higher rpm. Automatic transmissions make that more difficult or even impossible (depending on implementation).
Worst case: people are unhappy with the acceleration they can get at low rev, because the transmission only allows low rev at throttled state and they don't consider it socially acceptable to rev up. The engine would be capable of much more torque at the desired rpm, if only the throttle could be opened without the transmission shifting for higher rpm. Next time they will get a bigger engine that will be throttled even more. ICE inefficiency rises with high rpm and closed throttle (opening the throttle raises power output more than consumption). Ideal ICE efficiency is when the gear is selected so that torque at open throttle matches the power demand. Manual can come much closer to that than automatic. (Unfortunately, many people don't know that and drive manuals like automatic, e.g. never at really low rpm, never at really open throttle, because they think that opening the throttle would be wasteful)