How America lost its love for the stick shift • Hacker News Board

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#321

Post by 0x00000000 » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:17 AM UTC

jhayward wrote: post #309

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 arrant nonsense, and is just short of telling everyone who drives in freeway stop and go traffic that they're just idiots who don't know how to drive. Unless you can control the behavior of adjacent lanes there is no achievable amount of buffer space that eliminates stop and go. The best you can do is increase the glide time between stops. At times you will see, e.g., semis lining up side by side to help keep…

> The best you can do is increase the glide time between stops

Do you understand what causes traffic? That harder you brake, the bigger and longer the wave of people braking behind you will be. By braking less hard, you are causing less traffic.

And yes, 99% of people driving in traffic are idiots who don't know how to drive or they wouldn't be tailgating and slamming the brakes every 6 feet wasting thousands of hours of people's collective time by causing needlessly large waves of braking behind them due to the fact that those people are also following too close, amplifying the problem.

See http://trafficwaves.org/ for further reading

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#322

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:19 AM UTC

setr wrote: post #247

rootusrootus wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the OP didn't suggest taking away cars from poor people, just from people who can't be bothered to learn to drive responsibly.

If you take cars away from every group equally, then the poor are the least capable of finding an alternative (because they usually cost). In fact, if you take anything from the entire population in equal measure, its bound to affect the poor the most (because they’re the least capable of finding alternatives to the status quo). So in any such argument, they’d naturally become the front of the topic. If anyone is goi…

[deleted]

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#323

Post by Johnny555 » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:20 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #232

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…

People always say this, but frankly I find stop-and-go traffic isn't that bad if you put the car into neutral instead of holding down the clutch the whole time. I haven't looked back since I bought my first manual car. I never use cruise control at all though, even when I had an automatic car.

I'm not sure you understand persistent stop and go traffic -- shifting between neutral and first gets awfully tiring after 45+ minutes when you have to do it every day. Putting the car in neutral doesn't really solve that problem.

Adaptive cruise control with stop-and-go support is not really the same as cruise-control in free flowing traffic. I rarely use cruise-control in normal traffic, but the stop-and-go cruise control is a luxury I never realized I wanted until I had it.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#324

Post by manfredo » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:20 AM UTC

tempestn wrote: post #314

One thing I'd love to see in modern manual transmission sports cars is a lockout to prevent mechanical over-revs. It would be extremely cheap and simple to engineer—knowing the current RPM and gear ratios, it would just be a matter of a servo motor actuating a bar, physically blocking the shifter from engaging gears that would cause a mechanical overrev. If done right, the driver wouldn't even notice it was there, un…

If that servo fails to unlock, though, now you can't shift into certain gears. I thought that a centrifugal clutch disengage mechanism would solve this. Centrifugal clutches are already common in scooters - the clutch engages gradually as you rev above idle rpms. My theoretical feature is basically the opposite: a centrifuge that disengages at a given RPM. You _can_ shift into 1st at 100mph but your clutch will quickly disengage as your revs approach redline. You may burn out your clutch but those are cheaper to replace than engines.

Of course I have zero mechanical engineering background so who knows the feasibility of this approach.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#325

Post by toomanybeersies » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:21 AM UTC

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…

I've never had a huge issue with driving in stop-go traffic with a manual.

It really depends on the type of car you're driving though, I guess. Driving a sports car with a grippy clutch is going to be painful. Driving a $750, 20 year old Mazda with a 2 L engine and a soft clutch isn't too bad at all, you just sort of ride the clutch (which I am aware isn't great for it).

I think that there is nothing that beats driving a stick shift in winding hills. Autos and paddle shifts just don't feel the same. There's just something about the mechanical action of shifting manually that I love.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#326

Post by mrbrowning » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:22 AM UTC

I’m a committed manual driver, but I fully grant that dual-clutch transmissions and EV powertrains handily outclass manual transmissions from the perspective of effectiveness (although my casual understanding is that an electric motor without a gearbox is still going to be limited in its ability to provide torque at high rotor speeds). I would consider driving a car relying on either of those technologies, even though I favor the subjective experience of a manual transmission, but I still can’t imagine driving any vehicle with a torque converter or a CVT (CVTs sound great in theory, but as far as I know they’re still pretty limited in terms of torque tolerance). I’ve driven some nice autos and still find their response to torque demand from the pedal to be unacceptably slow, plus I find the way that throttle mapping works in manual transmission cars to be much more intuitively close to what I would expect from direct throttle control. Flooring it to induce a downshift feels like a crude distortion of the input space in a way that inhibits the development of an intuitive connection with the vehicle’s operation.

Anyway, if you’re a performance vehicle enthusiast on a budget, you’re going to have trouble finding a suitable car that isn’t equipped with a manual.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#327

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:22 AM UTC

goatslacker wrote: post #304

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…

Never found paddle shifters to be in the same league as a manual transmission even in modern high performance cars. There's always that bit of lag and delay with automatic that there isn't on a manual.

[deleted]

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#328

Post by ulises314 » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:22 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #232

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…

People always say this, but frankly I find stop-and-go traffic isn't that bad if you put the car into neutral instead of holding down the clutch the whole time. I haven't looked back since I bought my first manual car. I never use cruise control at all though, even when I had an automatic car.

That's what you are supposed to do, isn't? I think most (all?) car clutches are dry, so that means that not going to neutral at a stop would eat your clutch in a few months.

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#329

Post by rootusrootus » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:24 AM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #283

rootusrootus wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing going away faster than the manual at this point are dual clutch transmissions. Never really perfected in most instances, and the latest slushboxes actually outperform them. Faster shifts, more reliable, cheaper. I prefer my manual very much, but I have to hand it to the engineers, they've turned what used to be a performance-killing design into the best you can buy.

Hmm Is there a car in price range of golf gti that has that level of gas pedal responsiveness? I would love to take it for a test drive and see if my skepticism is warranted :)

Well, unless you're looking to actually buy, who says it has to be in the right price range? ;-)

Re: How America lost its love for the stick shift

#330

Post by Declanomous » Wed, Sep 12, 2018, 12:25 AM UTC

dkr88 wrote: post #287

pssflops wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My previous car, a 2008 Subaru WRX, in manual had cruise control; while it wasn't adaptive, it was the most important thing I will consider in any other manual transmission going forward. Stop-and-go traffic to my previous job made driving a chore and weekends weren't enough. I miss having that kind of control over the car, but the automatic Mazda3 I replaced it with has made that traffic an afterthought.

I test drove a 2008 WRX a while ago and the clutch was pretty heavy, IIRC. I remember thinking to myself "this would be a major pain in traffic".

I test drove a manual 2010 Impreza before I bought mine in automatic. The automatic has a 4EAT which sucks, but the clutch on the 5 speed would have sucked so bad in traffic.

As one of my friends with the same car said "it's a heavy clutch. It's not that bad to use if you are a tall guy, but if you are a short woman who weighs less than 120 pounds, you are going to have to stand on it or pull the steering wheel to use it"

He has the Saabaru, and his GF can't drive his car at all because of how heavy the clutch is.

Now that I only use my car for errands in the city I wish I had the manual, but I am so glad I didn't have it when I had a 1 hour commute each way in stop and go traffic.