OT: Look out, here comes some free advice…
- Thread starter Frabjous
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Hard to buy a new car with a manual transmission these days. Definitely a lost art.
I always found manuals quickly lost their appeal in stop and go traffic.
Nah. My weed dealer I've known since my Rutgers years. Just a friend.
My dad never owned a car with an automatic in his life. Did you know that Toyota used to make some Camrys with a standard trans? He loved Camrys.
I mostly agree about that, almost never bothered me and I find it keeps me from being totally bored by the traffic.
But the 2011 car I still have is a Mazdaspeed 3 with a clutch that is excessively stiff with an excessively small engagement point. And the tune it’s running, despite it being pretty gentle, makes low end torque such that if you don’t ride the clutch some, the car leaps away in first gear. It’s by far the toughest clutch I’ve driven, and by a huge margin.
This makes for great fun, but it is a handful in stop and go traffic where it can get old (it’s given me calf cramps from fatigue). But it’s the only car where I felt that way and I’ve had a bunch of manual cars over the years.
The dual upsides of the MS3s clutch is that it has been bulletproof through many miles of intense wheel spinning abuse and high speed driving, and it makes for a great clutch training car. Taught my youngest to drive a manual using that car ‘cause, once you can drive it, you can drive any manual easily. He stalled it at least 50 times over the 3 separate days it took for him to get comfortable with it.
6 month old story on Toyota EV with a manual...
I had read about that. Also, some manufacturers are playing around with the idea of producing fake engine and exhaust sounds.
I'll reserve final judgement about that stuff till I see what evolves. But I'm skeptical that I would find it the same as the real thing.
Seems to me that it would be like... like... hm... oh I know, like a hooker overdoing her acting job when faking pleasure. 😀
Two years ago last week I bought my first car with a manual transmission in California and drove it home. A week before flying out there, a buddy let me practice for about an hour in his Camaro, and that was all the experience I had with a manual trans before my cross-country trip. On the way back, I stopped at Arches National Park. The line to get in was stop and go for quite a long time, and I don't even remember how many times I stalled. The people around me must have thought there was something wrong with my car, but it was good practice at least, and both the drive through the park and the view from the end of the hike I did were well worth the embarrassment.
Also since this thread seems to have a lot of car enthusiasts, are you guys familiar with the movie Vanishing Point? While driving through Utah I stopped at the (now abandoned) gas station that the opening and closing scenes were filmed at. It's in a small ghost town known as Cisco, very eery place. The first couple days of my ride home were basically the reverse of what Kowalski drove in the movie.
Taught my girlfriend ( now wife)and all three kids to drive manual. When my daughter went away to college and needed a car let her have the manual - less chance any of her classmates would want to borrow it
