I have a stick shift in my car too. Tricked out PT cruiser..... Can burn the tires off. Very fun to drive.
Low information drivers.
*chuckle*
Glad I know how to drive both. :-)
Most of my vehicles have been standard shift.
I have to admit I’d have issues as well. The one time I had access to a stick shift (younger sister’s car), I had it for a few days and had to pay for a new clutch. Like ice-skating, just not my thing.
More p*ssyfication of America.
I tend to think there’s a racial element here.
Most blacks drive Automatics (not that they couldn’t drive sticks...in fact, they could almost certainly drive them better than whites, that are either airheads or metrosexuals).
But anyway, buying a car that discriminates against one class of thief sounds A LOT like a Title 9 violation. Hopefully the Justice Department will not convict, but you never know.
I learned to drive in a 1952 Chevy pickup, 4 speed. This was in ancient times, mid 1960’s.
My generation all learned to drive on standard shifts.
.
Heh... just think of the confusion a column-shift manual transmission would cause among the carjacker crowd. At least with a floor shifter, there’s a shift pattern right there on the lever.
I wouldn’t let my kids get their licenses when they turned 16 unless they drove a stick. I insist on driving one myself. It keeps me alert, gives me better control over the car, and gets better gas mileage.
The mysterious workings of the standard transmission is a lost art.
First car I ever drove was a Willies station wagon. Was a farm car Pop put out to pasture. Lived its life out in the fields. Must have been at least 15 of my school buddies (girls too, my sisters were good at it ) lean how to drive with that thing. Gas was cheap and after school we all had fun blasting the wind rows. I could upshift, downshift and jump a gear.
To the uniformed, jumping a gear was your basic 1st to 3rd shift, jumping 2nd. On a 4 speed, you could always do your basic 1st to 3rd, or 2nd to 4th.
My most favorite trick was synchronized shifting. You know, when you can run through gears WITHOUT the clutch. Just get your MPH in heavenly harmony with RPM and you could slide into the target gear smooth as silk.
Old guys (and a bunch of gals) know what I mean.
Back in the day I had a number of old 50s and 60s medium trucks. You had to practically be a magician to shift some of those old International cabovers. About a mile of linkage between the shifter and the transmission, and if you didn’t hold your mouth just right, you’d never hit the right gear. :-) It was an art.
I learned on a stick, a four on the floor. My third car was a Dodge Dart with three on the tree. A guy I knew pulled up next to me at a light on Sunrise Highway and started revving...so I threw it into first (so I thought), revved it up to pop the clutch and raced backwards at the green...dumb.
Short version of a true story: I stole a Jeep because the guys who were trying to steal it couldn’t drive three on the tree.
A couple decades ago, when I took my youngest in for her driver’s test, the female DPS testing-officer chewed me out for making my daughter take her test in a manual transmission vehicle.
That surprised me. You’d think they would want drivers to be able to drive a thinking person’s car. ;)
Once upon a time before I escaped the greatest Soviet of Chicago and Cook County Illinois, and moved to Georgia, I worked there as an Illinois state policeman in the Chicago area. My partner and I received a flash message over the Illinois State police emergency radio network advising of a carjacking in Greektown, a sub community at the University of Illinois medical Center in Chicago. Moments later we saw a car that fit the description jerking and bucking down the street at low speed with frustrated drivers honking their horns at it and passing in irritation. It was this unusual set of circumstances that attracted our attention to it in the first place.
We executed a felony stop on the car, detained the three passengers and the driver, and quickly determined that they were in fact the criminal miscreants described in the flash message. When we interrogated the suspects we discovered that the driver admitted he could not drive a manual transmission car (the hijacked Honda had a five speed manual transmission) but that he had always wanted to try to drive one, and figured this would be a good time for him to learn.
Even more interesting was that one of the crew was a duly licensed Class D. 18 wheel truck driver who was quite capable of driving the car, but his mastermind boss wouldn’t let him.
I got to admit that we coppers wouldn’t get so many of these idiots if they just weren’t so damn stupid.
A woman broke into our house about 10 years ago while we were on vacation. We got a call while we were in Japan that someone had left our stolen car in another part of Phoenix. After we got back, we got a call about the other car, which was also gone. The female house invader — a crack user looking for a place to sleep — had tried to take my stick-shift Beetle out for a drive. By the time she had gone a half mile she had ruined the transmission — to the tune of $1800 — and she had someone help push the car into a church parking lot. After a few days we got a call from the church letting us know that the car was there.