Old Beetles are way cool. Great machines in snow country too.
My grandfather taught me manual transmissions on his farm tractors.
My father taught to drive cars with manual transmissions & my first 3 cars in my life were all manual. I also ended up being a heavy equipment operator in the USAF & drove quite alot of manual shift vehicles there. That being said, my last three personal vehicles including my current F150 were/is an automatic transmission, and my next car hopefully in 2027 will be a Tesla with FSD, it is impressive.