It’s like a bicycle, or swimming. Once you learn you never forget.
I, too, still double clutch on downshifts. No way back into first gear of a sixties British sports car without it.
24 thoughts on “Driving A Stick”
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It’s like a bicycle, or swimming. Once you learn you never forget.
I, too, still double clutch on downshifts. No way back into first gear of a sixties British sports car without it.
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I almost always rent manual (sticks) when in Europe, due to them being cheaper. I learned to drive a stick in my teens due to having one, and never forgot how. However, I do get rusty and starting off in, say, Rome or London traffic while jet lagging is not fun. I find it especially hard in the UK (or anywhere that drives on the left) for the first few minutes in a stick, due to having to deal with driving plus shifting with my left.
Another reason to go stick in Europe is their insanely high fuel costs; sticks get better mpg.
Modern automatics typically get better mpg than manuals. But maybe not with the tiny engines in most European cars.
@ Edward M. Grant,
I agree regarding most engine sizes, but as you say, the tiny engines are a bit different. I’ve driven cars with less than a liter CC that I can’t imagine would work with an automatic. In one car I rented, the CC was 900. Looking under the hood revealed an engine the size of an outboard motor, but that car was actually decent performing at low speeds. However, it seemed to do it via high gearing and small wheels, so it was pretty much awful (gutless as well as very noisy) at highway speeds. Another I rented was a Vauxhaul Corsa with only 1.2 liters, and it was a bit better, but still awful at higher speeds.
BTW, in case you didn’t see my tardy reply, sorry for the case of mistaken identity a few threads back. Mea Cupla.
I forget what model it was, but one of my friends in the UK had a tiny Italian car of some description, where the engine was so small that he could unhook it from the car, pick it up, and carry it into the house to work on it on the kitchen table.
Had four of us crammed in it one time. Didn’t go very fast :).
Oh, yeah, I did think you’d probably confused me with someone else here. No problem :).
Probably an old Fiat 500 “Topolino” (little mouse). They were everywhere in Europe in the 50’s and 60’s. The 500 designation was based on engine displacement (500 cc); the same as a medium-displacement motorcycle.
At least a few motorcycle models with displacements appreciably smaller than 900 cc have been built with automatic transmissions so it’s probably the extra expense rather than the size of the engine that keeps ultra-low-end cars from being equipped with automatics.
I had to give up the stick because of metatarsalgia foot pain in my left foot. Years of clutch engagement in bumper to bumper traffic on 635 in Dallas took it’s toll and I switched back over to an auto my last car purchase. My Dad drove 18-wheeler for 50 years and I asked how he dealt with the clutch. He said the secret is you can rev match the gear shifts in a big rig transmission so you don’t have to use the clutch all the time. Just got to find that sweet spot in RPM’s and you can slip it from gear to gear without a single grind. It’s possible to do in a passenger car but a lot trickier with only 4-6 gears compared to the close gear ratios of a tractor trailers 10-18 gearbox.
I took my S2000 for a spin earlier this week. I haven’t driven it to work and back in several years. While not particularly fun in traffic, there was no major leg pain. The biggest problem is the low visibility of the car means you should hang back a little further, since you can only see the car’s in front of you taillights. That extra distance is an invitation for people to cut you off.
Heh. All of my driving practice had been on automatics; my mother’s attempt to teach me how to drive a stick ended in mutual frustration.
But when time came to buy a car of my own, I spent $500 on a 4-speed and jumped in with both feet (SWIDT?). Ticked off a lot of other drivers until I got the hang of it, but after maybe a week I was honing my speed-shifting.
I preferred stick when vehicles were a bit less reliable than today. Push starts and transmission braking is handy at those times. Now, you can have it. I run a business from my truck and shifting just adds more juggling I don’t need.
Plus, it’s not like you can’t engine brake with an automatic… my SuperDuty does it as part of the transmission programming in tow/haul mode, and these days with manually-shifting automatics it’s controllable and easy in most cars.
(I had an old Mercedes with an automatic you could tow/roll/push start; just a matter, I’m led to believe, of having the proper pumps in the transmission or TC to let it drive the engine rather than just the reverse.
Don’t think that’s common, though. But like you say, doesn’t matter, with modern, reliable cars.)
I much prefer driving a stick – especially int he Winter.
However my commute to work these days is bumper to bumper traffic for most of the way. You cannot get the clutch fully out when you want to move a car length. Bad for the clutch.
I’ve driven stick all my driving life (many decades) and this is the first time I had to replace a burned out clutch. I think it was due to all that stop and go traffic. Next car is an automatic.
This is clearly a requirements problem – the manufacturer’s system engineering team didn’t do their job! :-/
I will note in all seriousness that according to Road & Track, the latest-generation Porsche 911 Turbo, which comes only with an automated shift manual transmission, is designed with the clutches as lifetime parts – never need to be replaced. The car also has no warranty limit on the number of launch control starts that can be performed; apparently (I would not know this personally, not being in the socioeconomic strata required to purchase a sports car with launch control) most cars of this type have a limit of, say 50 launch control starts before it voids the powertrain warranty.
cthulhu I think it’s also a poor clutch design by Honda.
My slightly snarky (at Honda) point is that, theoretically, the system engineers are supposed to develop the requirements that the design engineers use to develop the design, and that in this case, the system engineers may not have considered the extreme stop-and-go traffic you describe as a requirement, leading to an under designed clutch. This is actually a serious point: my experience says that failure to identify all relevant requirements is the root cause in a substantial amount of engineering failures. Good system engineering is really hard, and very unglamorous – it can be difficult to get good people to do that work.
I learned on a stick, and the first four cars I owned were all sticks. The last one was s Chrysler Laser, which had such a hard clutch spring that the pedal ultimately failed in fatigue. I was living in Southern California at the time, and one day had to drive a 180 mile round trip on the 91 (which was even then a parking lot). I couldn’t walk when I got home. My left leg wouldn’t support me. That was 1986.
After that, I never owned a stick, and didn’t drive one until last year, when I spent a week in Germany. I rented some anonymous car (evidently built by VW, but with no livery), which had a five speed manual transmission and an unfamiliar shift pattern. I drove smoothly from the beginning, though I had to concentrate on it for a few minutes. Within an hour, I was comfortable in any situation – especially that of cruising at 180 kph among the best drivers on the planet. It truly doesn’t leave you.
The last one was s Chrysler Laser, which had such a hard clutch spring that the pedal ultimately failed in fatigue.
That sounds more like a problem with Chrysler Lasers than with clutches per se. I drove a Honda Accord in LA for almost twenty years. Use of that clutch was semi-automatic to me.
Yes, I made the mistake of buying a car the first year it was out. There’s a reason why the Laser didn’t last very long – a great many of them, in fact. But it did have a wonderful little turbo-charged engine, and was an excellent car on the windy roads around Vandenberg AFB.
Also, you’ll be proud of me for sticking with the topic instead of what I was going to do – which was to say that it’s a lot like sex. After ending a 27 year marriage, have a girlfriend and was pleased to discover that I haven’t forgotten how to have sex.
I believe the Chrysler Laser was just a rebadged Dodge Daytona which had already been out for a few years. That was back when MOPAR would take the same car and just give it a different name. Though each brand generally had its own traits: Chrysler had a plush interior, Dodge was the sporty side, and Plymouth generally got the pedestrian treatment. Then, they tried the Eagle car brand for a bit, I guess as an answer to GM’s Saturn brand, but that just muddied the waters even more so. Have no idea how it was even feasibly a good idea to have your own car brands eating each other’s sales from one another.
Saw a comment somewhere the other day (Techdirt, maybe?) about how, in ten years, when people ask “Is that a manual?” they will actually be asking “Does it have a steering wheel?”
The best stick car I ever had was a ’49 MG TC. Lovely short-throw 4 under the left hand, where God intended. No synchro in 1st, but no problem. Also almost no HP, but you can’t (or anyway, couldn’t in those days) have everything.
I read a study some years ago about the efficiency of manual transmissions vs. dual clutch automatics. It showed that manuals get somewhat better MPG than DCTs because the driver supplies the energy to disengage the clutch and move the gear shift lever while engine power has to supply that energy with a DCT. And it wasn’t a trivial amount: 21mpg for the DCT vs. 22 for the manual or something like that.
Compared to any kind of automatic, manual transmission are absolutely reliable which is why I’ll drive them until I’m no longer able to.
This video is my favorite on the subject.
youtu.be/aFvj6RQOLtM
A manual can sometimes survive having, say, second gear completely broken. And a non-functional electrical starting system.
In the case of a ’78 Ford Fiesta that is sitting on 4 flat tires in a barn Somewhere in Northeastern Wisconsin, a manual cannot survive the fluid leaking out of what is called a “hydraulic clutch.” No, not a fluid clutch as in early GM automatic transmissions but a hydraulic cylinder from clutch pedal to clutch plate, kind of like between brake pedal and brake pad.
Could start the car in neutral but never could get it into first gear without the ability to operate the clutch. You can’t “speed shift” into first gear from a dead stop. Unable to operate the car, the car was left to die where it was parked . . .