Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Classic Morgans (pre-CX) Auto VS Manual Gearbox.

Thought this article might be entertaining. Copied from The Guardian. Apologies if already seen.

You can do whatever you like when you’re reviewing a car, because the cultural standard was set by Jeremy Clarkson. You’re almost expected to ding it.

I once took a whole hubcap off a Toyota Hilux and pretended I’d done it off-road on a caper, when in fact I’d backed into a pillar in a car park. The Hilux was somewhat longer than I realised; watch out for that.
This being the case, I’d been doing the job for years without a moment’s anxiety, not even when I took a Ferrari California T on the Isle of Wight ferry and its internal alarm thought it was being car-trafficked. And then I found myself in a Fiat Spider on a winding Italian road (lovely little roadster built off the Mazda platform) and I’ve never been so stressed in my goddam life.

The problem was, I had a spectator. It was a press trip, we were in pairs, taking turns to drive. People who think of themselves as car enthusiasts, natural born drivers, only mean one thing: they really like changing gear, at exactly the right time. It can be rough or smooth, a box or a bang shift, it’s like jazz, it doesn’t really matter what you do so long as you make a convincing case that you did it on purpose. These drivers make noises with their mouths about handling and torque and whatnot, but all they’re really talking about is how good they are at a manual. There is no gear-changing style that’s good enough for these people, short of also being really good, which I am not. They stare at you, agape, when you’re slow or cautious changing gear, and God forbid you wait for the car display to tell you that you should be shifting; why are you even in a car if you don’t love the engagement and control?


It should go without saying that my driving partner at the time, a career-long car critic, was probably the best gear-changer civilisation had ever seen, but what he didn’t have was a poker face. He winced as if in physical jeopardy whenever I changed gear, which was at first too often, then later, not often enough. The quality of my driving fell rapidly to the point that, between the winding roads and my sweaty, maladroit hands, I began to feel that maybe we were both in danger, and ceded him the wheel for the rest of the day.

So it’s drivers like that who have my thoughts and prayers, as the DVLA announced this week that 20% of driving tests are now taken in automatics, and only 29% of registrations last year were of manual cars. I don’t personally give a stuff what other people drive, but if you have a fair wedge of your identity pinned to being good at a thing that people are no longer even bothering to learn, that’s bound to sting.
Most people can see the sense of going automatic: it’s awesome how many driving lessons it takes to become even mediocre on the clutch. Electric and plug-in hybrids are all automatic anyway. Car future looks increasingly driverless, even if that technology is farther away than has been claimed. Car club membership might still be almost entirely (87%) a London thing, but various factors – sustainability, and the fact that no one has any money – are likely to push up demand in the medium term, and it will make sense for those fleets to go automatic if that’s what a fifth of people are learning.

So it’s left to What Car? magazine to worry about driving becoming a “lost art”, as it did when the DVLA figures emerged, its consumer editor, Claire Evans, commenting: “Any enthusiast will tell you that for sheer driving pleasure, manual gearboxes always win.” She’s not wrong about that. The basis of the joy is the deeper relationship with the car: you have to listen, really listen, to it, with your feet and hands as well as your ears, and in return it will be more responsive to you, the acceleration will be better, everything will feel smoother and more elegant.
But it’s not just about pleasure, really, it’s also about pride in one’s own excellence, and in order to truly revel in that, other people have to be bad at it. Driving manual is about to tumble from general purpose adulting – at which everyone should excel, but only some people do – to niche, nostalgic hobby, which you find out by accident someone’s great at and wonder why. I’m going to go with “not the end of the world”, but what do I know? I drove all the way to the vet in first, once, because my dog was asleep on the gear stick.

* Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Happy Miles.

Excellent. We've had our automatic Mini SE for over 2 years now and I rather like the simplicity and convenience, especially in traffic. But I still sometimes find my left hand reaching for a gear lever after I pull away.

If fantasy became reality and I found I could actually afford to buy a CX, it would definitely be an auto.

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

I was never a fan of auto boxes but then the traffic volumes in my neck of the woods were light in the 60`s and 70`s thus playing tunes on the exhaust system with a bit of heel and toe while swapping cogs, was very much part of the enjoyment of driving. I did drive an 80`s mini with an auto box which would have put me off auto boxes for life, had it not been for the 60`s Jensen Interceptor I owned for a while, which had a Chrysler Torqueflight auto box which other than by the flick of the rev counter needle, I would defy anyone to detect that it had changed gear, I guess having a 6276cc engine helped smooth out the process somewhat too... (-: Seems Rolls Royce of the same era used the Chrysler Torqueflight box..?

It seems such have been the increase in traffic volumes in most places in the last 30-40 years that we were as ever following in the footsteps of the US and adopting auto boxes as the norm, a manual is no fun in stop/start traffic, and less so if it might be connected to an engine with a lumpy cam and a tendency to run hot at tick-over...perhaps with a competition clutch and a lightened flywheel... OK I took that too far, but I did run a 60`s Lotus Elan very much like that in the 70`s

As you typed John, modern engine performance and auto boxes have come on in leaps and bounds, so much so that even the numbers of Porsche drivers preferring PDK over manual has increased considerably over the years and as you noted the performance of those boxes can equate to an average driver beating the 0-60 times of a manual box in the hands of a racing driver, and be more fuel efficient in the long run too.. Changed days when even high end performance cars may not even offer a manual option in some of their machines...

However I guess that as I rarely have to contend with traffic, manual would have been my first choice, though as I aged and my good lady chose auto for her car, her/our daily, I got used to it and could see some advantage, and as she would be likely to use as a backup, the tin top sports car I was contemplating purchasing a couple of years back, I went for PDK, which worked out well for her and just slightly less so for me, but then I admit to having Luddite tendencies..(-:

Tesla... well now that is a whole different ball game.... and as a basic transport system it well suits the old man I have become, with enough acceleration to ..err...surprise..at almost any speed, bringing smoothness in the accelerative process to a whole different level..!!!

We will drive a manual gearbox when ever possible. My thought is it makes you pay more attention to what is going on. My wife has always driven a manual. Our 4/4 and Mazda 3 are manual. We also have a GMC Yukon XL (the tank) that is not available with a manual. My daughter learned to drive and took her test with a manual. In fact, her car had to go to the dealership for service and they gave her a loaner car that had an automatic. They had to teach her how to use it.

My son is the black sheep of the family. He refuses to drive a stick.

Hi Tim,

Most of these new "automatics" are really automatic clutches rather than auto transmissions. With flappy paddles you can use them entirely manually if you want to so you get the best of both worlds. Our main tintops have had them for years and they are great. Having said that I love my manual Fiat 500 which is a great little car to drive.

Hope you're well.

Best,

John

That saying "drive stick" always makes me smile. Brings back memory of the episode in NCIS, where some chap tries to drive Duckie's Morgan. Even though his life depended on it, he just could not get it moving. Guess he couldn't "DRIVE STICK"

Both of our daily drivers are VW Golf TDIs, a wagon and a hatchback. They both have the DSG "automatic" that can be used in manual mode either with the paddles or the gearshift lever. We love them particularly on long road trips where we get 50+ MPG.

I've made my views on autos plenty of times. All I will say is that the manual box on our Polo GTI is the best manual box I've ever driven. Hot knife through butter. Positive shift. Total pleasure. If you would rather not have the involvement of a manual box that's fine, but autos are not "better", just different, and a trend which will continue in this push button world.

That is my Morgan and he genuinely got in the wrong side, however he could drive stick but the Director thought it would be funny if he pretended he couldn't after getting in the wrong side. They added the gear crunching noises afterwards, I can assure they looked after Megan really well and David McCallum loved driving her, it was a fun time.