I got my license in the early 80’s, and at that time the cheapest cars were older american beaters with utterly terrible 2 and 3-speed slushbox automatics. The alternative were Japanese cars like Honda Civics, small, reliable, manual transmission cars that got great gas mileage and were way more fun to drive. All these years later I’m still driving a manual, currently a 2021 Toyota Corolla. It’s paid for, it gets around 35 mpg, and with regular maintenance it will run until the end of time.
I know American cars have improved a lot since the malaise era but you generally can’t get them with manual transmissions, so I’ll stick with the imports for now.
Ok, so they’re performance focused. Who is making cars that are built for the most engaging driving experience? Are those “drive a slow car fast” type cars all already built?
Plenty of brands stopped offering manual variants of plenty of models. IIRC BMW practically begged people to stop asking for manual variants, saying it just does not make any sense to mess with the supply chain and the production line and the car itself just to put an objectively inferior transmission inside it.
The M series cars still have manual as an option, although IIRC the automatic versions have better performance. They’re a bit outside of my price range, so I’m trying to keep my old manual 328i running as long as I can.
On the contrary, it makes no sense to put automatic transmissions into sports cars.
On public roads, you’re not gonna be able to drive them as fast as they can go anyway.
An automatic transmission may offer better performance, but you have 5x as much of that as you can use already.
What a manual transmission offers is the feeling of being in full control.
It’s simply more fun and engaging to drive.
But apparently, cars aren’t made to offer the best experience possible anymore.
Auto transmissions are now cheaper and anyone can drive them, so the potential market is bigger. And that’s what matters, even up to the Lamborghini price bracket.
What a manual transmission offers is the feeling of being in full control.
Being able to maintain a gear selection and being able to directly control the clutch are huge advantages in specific conditions like extreme weather or some off road terrain. A surprise shift during a curve in icy conditions makes me nervous every time for example.
If an automatic system allowed for direct control of gears and the ability to disengage and reingage the clutch on demand it would cover those scenarios.
The company car I get to use has an automatic transmission that drives me mad.
Its shift points are always right above the speeds I usually drive at.
It shifts into third at 40 km/h which is too fast for a speed limit of 30.
It shifts into fourth at 60 which is too fast for a speed limit of 50.
And it shifts into fifth at 80 which is too fast for a speed limit of 70.
So you’re constantly driving with too high rpm’s, burning more fuel and making more noise than you’d have to.
It has a “manual mode” where you can shift by moving the stick up or down. But it doesn’t actually do anything. If you shift at a different point than the automatic would, you just get a “shift denied” message on the dash, even though the rpm’s wouldn’t even get close to being too low.
And when you push the gas pedal just a bit more than half, it shifts down and the engine roars, but it doesn’t actually achieve much cause the car doesn’t have much power.
Internal combustion engines are most fuel-efficient at low rpm’s (<1500) and full throttle, and that’s impossible to do with this transmission. So it only gets 34mpg (7l/100km), and it’s a Diesel hatchback. My old manual car also had a 34mpg rating, but the way I drive I could get 47 (5l/100km), and it had a gasoline engine.
What’s the torque band? Driving a diesel, it’s really high compression and torque is applied low in the rpm range. Gasoline is a lot lower compression and might be twice the rpm to get the most torque. Outside of that torque band and your using more fuel for less movement.
Every engine is the most efficient at max torque, which for a typical car’s gasoline engine would be around 4500 rpm.
But that “efficiency” means fuel burnt per unit of power. At max torque, you have much more power than you need for normal driving.
As a rule of thumb, you get the best real-world fuel economy at full throttle just above the low rpm limit where the engine would run “jerky”.
That’s at 1000-1500rpm for a passenger car’s gasoline engine.
At that rev range, you may only get 40 horsepower out of an engine rated for 100 at max torque, but that’s enough. You only need around 10 to maintain your speed against wind resistance, and you don’t actually lose any time accelerating slowly cause you’re gonna be at the next red light soon, anyway.
For reference, when I’m accelerating from a stop to highway speeds, I’ll shift to 2nd gear as soon as I’ve moved one car length, 3rd at 30km/h, 4th at 40, 5th at 50, flooring the throttle the entire time I’m not shifting. Then I’ll stay in 5th unless I’m forced to brake below ~45 again. Up or down a hill I’ll go one gear lower.
In my Diesel van, I regularly drive 40 in 5th gear.
I can’t make you take my word for it, but this is what I learned in a work-sponsored course for fuel efficient driving, and it got me much better fuel economy than the manufacturer’s claim for any car I drove in the past 20 years.
The systems used in these cars are dual clutch - they always offer (or only have) a manual shift mode, which will hold the gear you’re in until you say when, and only down/upshift if you bang the rev limiter or try to go below minimum RPM.
Technically, yes, there is a little automatic like shifter to let you select PRNDS (S or M for manual shift mode), but would you want to do that? nope.
My bigger q is, why are you doing a clutch kick in a supercar that will probably break if you try that? Most Lambos are 4WD, and 4WD cars will break stuff if you go for a clutch kick.
What job, though?
When I’m driving a fun car, I want to actually drive it, not hold the steering wheel and push paddle-shaped buttons that ask a computer to shift for me (if it feels like it).
Because the dual clutch is a lot faster at shifting than the standard manual, and you can put more gears on the dual clutch sjnce you no longer have to deal with a growingly large shift pattern on a stick.
Top tip for dual clutch: You pull the shift lever slightly short of when you want to upshift. Your car will still accelerate while the computer sets up the shift (it has to do or verify the next gear is ready before pulling the trigger on the clutch switchover), and when it shifts, it is so fast the engine even sputters a couple times from the RPMs dropping so fast the timing is momentarily off on one or two ignitions.
All that happens in the span of time it takes for you to kick the clutch to the floor and reach for the stick in a standard manual.
I mean, the reality is that manual/standard transmissions are just fuel and effort inefficient at this point. There was a window where automatics were inefficient enough to make learning stick worth it but that is LONG gone. And CVTs, in apples for apples comparisons, kind of are the best of both worlds.
Still pretty shocked since I don’t think anyone buys a ferrari or a lambo because they want a reasonable high quality car and nothing screams “I am compensating” like wrapping your hands around that shaft while you drive but… if the goal is performance?
The main reasons you wanted a manual back in the day was price - because automatic transmissions were expensive - and fuel economy - because they were less efficient. (To a lesser extent reliability, because automatics were newer and they hadn’t worked out the kinks yet.)
However, the price of automatics fell, and the dual-clutch gearboxes with 7-10 gears are even more efficient because they keep the car in the most efficient rev range. Same goes for CVTs. And the dual-clutches shift faster than you ever could, so they’re better for sports cars, which is why F1 switched to them a long time ago.
So it makes sense that manuals are falling out of favor because they’re objectively worse in all respects compared to the transmissions available today. However, subjectively they’re a lot more fun which is why I have a manual transmission car I plan on keeping on the road well into the 2050s.
Fun and more control. I too am in the I bought a manual club. Twice my truck and my wife’s car are both manual transmissions with a clutch (third pedal).
I guess some of the new dual clutch transmissions are considered manual 🤔
I love manuals but while they do give more control than a basic automatic transmission, I don’t think I could argue that they give more control than an automatic with paddle shifters.
But if I’m trying to to break the back end out, engine brake downhill, or have a dead battery and want to pop the clutch to start it I really want a manual transmission or a sequential gearbox.
I also can rebuild a manual in my garage (and have) so I’m more comfortable with something I can easily service if I need to. I drive 20 year old cars and intend to keep them, and any other car we buy, on the road for decades to come.
Modern cars will not push start on a dead battery - the alternator won’t engage and the engine computer won’t have the juice to boot up to tell the alternator or the fuel pump to engage.
Genuinely, do any US models use proper CVTs? In my experience I’ve only seen CVTs where the maker programs it to behave and rev like an automatic 6-speed, which renders the entire point of a CVT moot.
Nope. When Nissan came out with them they acted like normal CVTs without shift points, but people hated it so they added them in, and now they all do it.
Ferrari does it because they openly disdain their own customers. You will get performance the Ferrari way and you will like it. You’re lucky we even allow you to buy it. We put in the finest dual clutch transmission available because that’s the highest performance.
Lamborghini does it because they’re Audi’s with sharp edges. Audi is a company that advertises that its top trim can fit a set of golf clubs in back. They don’t want to bother their golf customers with a third pedal.
Their target demographic doesn’t care about manuals. Their buyers either are most likely buying a status symbol and the ones who are actually looking to drive them are looking to emulate the F1 / IMSA experience where absolutely none of those cars are manuals
Fair enough. I usually take ten or twenty minutes of “So… let me just crank the radio up so you can’t hear me mangling your transmission” in a parking lot/empty roads to “remember” how to drive stick, but it is a much more active style of driving.
But that has nothing to do with safety. And, arguably, is considerably worse for it since it is less time focused on the road and, more importantly, the sides of the road. It is basically the opposite of the “autopilot” versions of Adaptive Cruise Control where it increases distractions and leads to less attentive drivers for whatever insanity other people are going to do.
If I were buying a super fast fun car to use at the track or whatever? Well, I would want paddle shifters because the real vroom vrooms have those. But a stick shift and a clutch are a close second.
But for something that I am going to drive in rush hour traffic or do a 10 hour drive to my favorite climbing spot every couple weeks?
CVTs, in apples for apples comparisons, kind of are the best of both worlds.
In theory they have advantages, but in practice they’re probably the worst kind of transmission you could get right now unless you’re driving a low-horsepower econo-car. (Even then I don’t think I’d want one; I’d rather pay a little more for gas than risk an expensive early transmission failure.)
I didn’t know what a dual clutch transmission was and found this excellent video while searching. Figured I would share it here. Pretty awesome! You get the direct gearing benifits of a manual with the shifting ease and speed of an automatic.
I once had a Veloster with a dry plate dual clutch. Identical in design to a standard manual, just with a different clutch system and input shafts design, and computery bits controlling it.
If you drove it the way you drive a stick, it would last a long time.
Got almost 175,000 miles on it before it had any problems. At that mileage, the car was well and truly worn out, so not worth fixing, but I would have fixed the problem (failed 2nd clutch motor, common issue on the KIA/Hyundai DCT) if the car wasn’t all worn out.