Manual

A lament by Ian Bogost on the looming extinction of manual auto transmissions.  Manuals now constitute less than 3% of new cars sold in the U.S., some European car makers are completely phasing them out in the next few years, and electric cars don't even have gearboxes.

I learned to drive on a stick shift in 1967 and drove manuals exclusively until the mid-80s, when I finally gave in and got an automatic.  But then, in 2003, I began driving a 6-gear Nissan 350Z and rediscovered the joys of real driving, and continued to do so until 2016, even taking it out on the Lime Rock track in CT, an exhilarating and exhausting experience.  During our occasional Europe trips I'd always rent a manual with the highlight being mastering the coastal road on the Amalfi Coast with its blind corners and clearances of an inch or so between you and cars going the opposite direction (don't forget to fold in your side view mirrors!).

On our recent France trip I once again rented a manual.  Finding out on our first day I had Covid, I was concerned about getting so sick I could not drive, and Mrs THC, while she'd driven manuals on the hills of San Francisco decades ago, was no longer comfortable doing so, prompting me to try in vain to rent something automatic but finding nothing available, other than large panel trucks not suitable for where we'd be.  Fortunately my very mild symptoms abated within 24 hours (and the Mrs never got it) and was able to enjoy a month of shifting on constricted, winding country roads and navigating through the narrow alleys, in the little town in which we were staying.

From Bogost's piece:

I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. . . And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it.  

But the manual transmission’s chief appeal derives from the feeling it imparts to the driver: a sense, whether real or imagined, that he or she is in control. According to the business consultant turned motorcycle repairman turned best-selling author Matthew Crawford, attending to that sense is not just an affectation. Humans develop tools that assist in locomotion, such as domesticated horses and carriages and bicycles and cars—and then extend their awareness to those tools. The driver “becomes one” with the machine, as we say. 

The manual transmission’s impending disappearance feels foreboding not (just) because shifting a car is fun and sensual, but also because the gearshift is—or was—a powerful cultural symbol of the human body working in unison with the engineered world.

To lament the end of the manual transmission is to eulogize much more than shifting gears. When the manual dies, little about driving will fall away that hasn’t already been lost. But we’ll lose something bigger and more important: the comfort of knowing that there is one essential, everyday device still out there that you can actually feel operating.