I've been driving automatic cars for over 40 years and they have moved on a long way from the basic Borg Warner 3 speeds, back in the 70's and 80's small engine automatic cars where not a pleasure to drive. Today it's very different, auto's are very sophisticated, smooth and often out perform the manual cars in both acceleration and economy
The wife's car has a nine speed auto, with flappy paddles and 3 drive options, eco, comfort and sport only pulling 1400rpm at 70mph, mated to a very torquey diesel engine , it really moves when it wants to. Easy to drive vast distances without effort and less tiring to drive in dense traffic, so much the norm these days.
I must admit I enjoyed my manual Porsche 930 Turbo and my Morgans, on the rare occasions we had a challenging bit of empty country road to go up and down the gearbox, but the reality is most of my driving is in dense slow moving traffic and gog swopping and balancing the clutch is not so much fun then
