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How America lost its love for the stick shift

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Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#261

Post by vageli »

BeetleB wrote: post #231
jedberg wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engine breaking just means slowing down by letting the foot off the gas. You aren't really slowing down that quickly. Someone has to really not be paying attention to miss it. It would be the equivalent of someone merging.

>Engine breaking just means slowing down by letting the foot off the gas. Given how often I've driven on stretches of road where engine braking is prohibited, I beg to differ. Engine braking is usually braking by shifting to a lower gear.

In my experience, places where engine braking is prohibited tend to be with the intent to reduce engine braking by tractor trailers or other large apparatuses, which can be very loud. In much of the U.S, posted signage prohibits "Jake braking" which specifically targets tractor trailers and other large trucks. [0]

[0]: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/96447/why-prohibi...

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#262

Post by rootusrootus »

taeric wrote: post #223
rootusrootus wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure it's really that big a deal. My dad taught me to drive by going out to a lonely national park with a lot of parking lots and letting me figure it out. On an automatic, yes. 20 minutes later he said, okay, good, now drive us home. And I did. Driving isn't that magic. So I will probably teach my kids how to drive our pickup first, and then for laughs we will take my 455 horsepower Camaro out to learn how a…

Driving is one of those things that most of us probably have no clue how everyone else actually thinks about and does it. To that end, I just don't know. I expect I will have an issue teaching my children. Biking has already thrown me some curve balls. Nothing insurmountable. But the more you have on the bike, the harder it is for the learner to get it going. I mean, I hate biking without my shoes that attach to the…

Oh man, I remember how long it took me to learn to ride a bike. Quite a lot longer than driving a car, I'm afraid. Learning that you have to turn one way, fall, and turn the other way is definitely counterintuitive and requires your brain to do some rewiring.

I also hate attaching my feet to the pedals. I do not want to confess that I've hit the ground in a very undignified manner more than once because I couldn't get my feet unclipped in time :(

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#263

Post by lotsofpulp »

0x00000000 wrote: post #208
t0mbstone wrote: post #163

Speaking as someone who has owned a number of sports cars with manual transmissions, I can tell you why I finally made the switch to automatic: Adaptive cruise control in stop and go traffic. I used to have to deal with a six-speed manual transmission in stop and go traffic for an hour every day, and it was pure torture. I mean, sure, it was fun for a weekend drive in the mountains, but it sucked the rest of the time…

To each their own, but stop and go traffic does not exist in the absence of stoplights if you leave adequate space in front of you. If you tailgate, ride your brakes, or have to stop completely you are contributing to traffic jams behind you. I drive a 6 speed in one of the worst traffic areas in the US every day.

This is impossible to achieve since every vehicle has different acceleration and every driver has different response times.

There will always be stop and go traffic once the carrying capacity of the road is reached. Once the capacity of the road is reached, it's actually most beneficial for everyone to be as close to each other as possible, and fill gaps as quickly as possible, since there's a finite amount of road at any given time, so only way to maximize is is to fill up as much if it as possible.

Also why you should use all lanes available and create zipper merge at the very end.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#264

Post by bobwaycott »

r00fus wrote: post #221
0x00000000 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each their own, but stop and go traffic does not exist in the absence of stoplights if you leave adequate space in front of you. If you tailgate, ride your brakes, or have to stop completely you are contributing to traffic jams behind you. I drive a 6 speed in one of the worst traffic areas in the US every day.

This is pure conjecture. You cannot control how traffic behaves, and if you constantly let people go in front of you, people behind you will get irrationally angry (danger exposure). Yeah you can smooth things out and inject a bit more zen into your experience by accelerating and decelerating more gently and leaving a larger than normal gap, but stop&go simply exists and is a pain even with an automatic. Adaptive cru…

Nah. When freeway traffic slows, you halve the speed of the vehicle in front of you. Leave 4-5 car lengths between you. Regulate your gas pedal usage so you never have to touch the brakes. You mostly just coast. Sure, there’s one vehicle that will come up quickly behind because that’s how everyone usually deals with it. By the time they slow, wondering why there’s so much space in front of you, they have time to recognize the other lanes are deadlocked and stop-and-go, while the lane they’re in never ceases moving. You’ll notice they start mimicking your movements/behavior. Occasionally, a car in the next lane inevitably thinks they’re going to get somewhere by getting in front of you—let them. They’ll just ride up on the ass of the vehicle in front of you while you again adjust speed slightly to leave the same amount of space. I’ve been driving this way for years and I never see a noticeable effort by the people behind me to get in front of me or ride my ass. People hate stop-and-go-till-you-move-five-feet-then-stop-again. People are happy, however, to be constantly moving, even if it’s only at 10-15mph, passing everyone sitting in the lane beside them.

Adaptive cruise control is easy to achieve no matter the car, and without any technology doing it. You just do it yourself.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#265

Post by amalcon »

tspike wrote: post #211
taeric wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people I know that refer to engine braking have always meant something faster than an automatic would do. Unless you are talking about letting of the gas and downshifting in an automatic. Is it guaranteed to get you in a wreck? Not at all. But, I would be surprised if people weren't more keyed to the "red light" in front of them than you are letting on.

More blame should be assigned for being dangerous to the person who only glances up from his phone when he sees red lights than to the engine braker.

Being able to assign the blame elsewhere is cold comfort when you've been in an auto accident.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#267

Post by linuxftw »

imglorp wrote: post #110
headcanon wrote: post #53

My father bought me my first car, under the conditions that it had to be a stick, since he wanted me to learn in general, and since you have to pay attention more to the road, your likelihood of getting into an accident decreases significantly. Now I drive a manual Golf GTI and I'm firmly of the "cold dead hands" camp with having it. I always wonder why other people don't like driving, and then I drive their cars. Ha…

> since you have to pay attention more to the road I'm teaching an attention-impaired teenager to drive, and we're doing stick for exactly this reason: extra cog load reduces daydreaming? Perhaps that's a controversial idea. But for him, so far so good.

Super hard to talk/text and drive when you have to shift as well.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#269

Post by skookumchuck »

t0mbstone wrote: post #163

Speaking as someone who has owned a number of sports cars with manual transmissions, I can tell you why I finally made the switch to automatic: Adaptive cruise control in stop and go traffic. I used to have to deal with a six-speed manual transmission in stop and go traffic for an hour every day, and it was pure torture. I mean, sure, it was fun for a weekend drive in the mountains, but it sucked the rest of the time…

> pure torture

You're just not worthy of a stick. I'd get a crash box if they offered one. Synchromesh is for wussies.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#270

Post by CamperBob2 »

kenhwang wrote: post #107
esaym wrote: post #96

Not sure what "audi" (a German company) has to do with America but what ever. For my own tastes, once my 2000 Ford mustang's automatic tranny started acting funny sometimes (after 15 years and 200k miles), I bought a used manual tranny, flywheel, and clutch pedal set from a wrecked mustang of the same year and did a swap. Much happier now. I also feel more "invincible". If my starter goes out, I won't be stranded, I…

Supposedly, it's newsworthy because Audi was going to discontinue manuals much sooner, but one of their execs pushed for continued offering because of "demand in the US". Porsche got a lot of backlash in the US when they discontinued manuals, to the point where they engineered a brand new manual gearbox with parts sharing with their PDK just because of US demand for the latest generation. Audi thought there was also…

Audi may have been confronted with the lesson that BMW already learned to its chagrin: there's no demand for crappy manuals in the US.

That said, the only reason cars have a transmission at all is because of a serious flaw in the way internal combustion engines work. That means that the best transmission would be no transmission at all... and the transmission that best approximates that state of affairs is, more or less inarguably, PDK.

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