[Dr. Sivana]

Learned on a Dodge Dart with “Three on the Tree”, still my preferred shifter location. I’ll take auto, but the manual was okay.

I was under the impression that modern manual transmissions aren’t as manual as they appear, that computers are doing things out of sight. Any truth to that?

[FreedomPoster]

Plain vanilla manual transmissions still don’t have much if anything in the way of computerization. There are what I call automated manual transmissions, which I describe in my previous post, that are sold as automatics.

[Charles Martel]

Column-shifted manual transmissions are great. Not as tight and precise a shift as with a floor-mounted unit, but the experience of driving a car or truck so equipped is like a small taste of time-travel. A three-on-the-tree is now so utterly foreign that it would be the ultimate anti-theft feature.

As for computers interfering with modern manual transmissions, there have been some cars with mechanisms that force the driver to skip gears by blocking parts of the shift pattern based on how hard you're driving. Easy enough to defeat.