441–450 of 729 posts
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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? ;-)
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I learned to drive in a manual. Now that my son is getting close to driving age, I wanted to teach him in a manual first, like I learned - and then I found out it's damned near impossible to _find_ one any more.
Same. I bought a Tacoma a couple of years ago, and while there was technically a manual option available, nobody actually had one, or could tell me when I could get one.
Ctrl-F "traffic" shows up nothing in the article - there's not much discussion of "why" other than the technology is better. Truth is that when you are stuck in bumper to bumper traffic, stopping and starting, manuals are tedious and not a good experience.
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I used to drive from Connecticut to Queens every single morning. I am familiar with the concept of traffic. Nobody in their right mind enjoys driving in heavy traffic no matter what car they're in.
> I used to drive from Connecticut to Queens every single morning. That doesn't seem like a bad drive. Try two hours from Western SF to the Golden Gate Bridge (roughly six miles).
There's little argument for manual transmission anymore except in larger vehicles. There used to be an efficiency gap, in that a good manual driver was more efficient than an automatic. But two things have happened since then, we have computer controlled transmissions and CVTs. Manual drivers were more efficient because they learned when the vehicle would need to shift, and shifted preemptively. A computer controlled…
They are rare in larger vehicles as well. Only Ram still makes a manual for their deisel heavy duty, and they detune the engine by 200 ft/lbs of torque. Automatics HD trucks do not disengage/spool down the turbo when shifting, which is important when you are pulling large loads up a hill.
That said, we don't have many big pickup trucks like the US does - here it's much more common to see mid-duty trucks like the Isuzu Elf in that space.
My last car (a Subaru STi) had a nice 6 speed. I replaced it this spring, with a newer ride that came only with an automatic. Probably is the wave of the future.
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This comes up often, but you gotta think about what would happen if everyone suddenly tripled the gap they leave in front of them. The same road surface would suddenly have 1/3 the throughput. I shudder to think what kind of traffic jam / commute time that would lead to at the edges of the road network. I do appreaciate when people drive densely packed and I try to do the same (up to a safety limit). For merging ther…
> The same road surface would suddenly have 1/3 the throughput At the same velocity . It's quite possible that with the increased gap and increased flow (less stop & go), you could get higher velocity out of it to compensate. Maybe not 3x the velocity, but 2x gap and 2x velocity seems within the realm of possibility (a 60mph road that slows down to 30mph because people are driving stupidly). Edit: on the low end, thi…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_diagram_of_traffic...
This is super interesting! As kind of expected, there's a middle zone that balances out density and velocity. In the context of what we were talking about, the fourth "Basic Statement" jumps out at me: "If one of the vehicles brakes in unstable flow regime the flow will collapse."
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> I used to drive from Connecticut to Queens every single morning. That doesn't seem like a bad drive. Try two hours from Western SF to the Golden Gate Bridge (roughly six miles).
It's like sixty miles. It takes 90 minutes without traffic.
At an average of 40 miles per hour that's not particularly bad. The people complaining about driving in stop-and-go traffic are almost certainly in much worse traffic than that.
The example I gave of getting from one end of San Francisco to another happens pretty much every holiday weekend. Average speed? About 3 mph. The worst part is the uphill approach to the GG Bridge.
Or you can look at the other SF bridge. In traffic (which has gotten so bad you'll see it like this on pretty much any weekend afternoon) it'll easily take an hour to get from the 280/101 interchange to the Bay Bridge approach (about 7 miles).
Traffic like that is why I rarely commute by car, but also why many people simply don't want to drive a car with a manual transmission.