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Stick Another Fork In The Manual Transmission

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I have a different perspective on this. I'm fine with a dual clutch on track but would prefer a manual for the street. Regardless where you fall on this issue the reality is the manual is headed to extinction soon. In this article Lamborghini explains why they are no longer offering a manual, Ferrari and McLaren no longer offer manuals in any cars, and Porsche may not be far behind. Enjoy your Bosses and GT350's as they may be the last of the breed. ???

http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1101921_lamborghini-manuals-are-history-and-dual-clutch-looks-like-the-future

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TymeSlayer

Tramps like us, Baby we were born to run...
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It's a shame since most of us on here have grown up with a stick and find that it actually adds to the whole driving experience. I would have been greatly disappointed had they turned our Bosses and GT350s into autos. Seems like our kids will grown up without the true shifting experience and perhaps most of the rest of the driving skills we honed as they may be brought up in a world full of autonomous rides.

May the manual RIP!
 
TymeSlayer said:
It's a shame since most of us on here have grown up with a stick and find that it actually adds to the whole driving experience. I would have been greatly disappointed had they turned our Bosses and GT350s into autos. Seems like our kids will grown up without the true shifting experience and perhaps most of the rest of the driving skills we honed as they may be brought up in a world full of autonomous rides.

May the manual RIP!
+1
 
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You haven't been able to get a manual in a Mercedes in the US for over 10 years already. Almost 15 years since you could get a 1/2 ton pickup with a manual.

I read that over 90% of BMWs are now auto and even the M3/M4 cars are over 80% auto.

There might be a few niche cars left with manuals in 10 years, but it will be very rare. Sad but true.

I wouldn't be surprised if Colorado sells the highest percentage of manual transmission vehicles of any state. I have a 2014 Wrangler Rubicon with a six-speed manual and had no trouble finding one. The dealer told me they still sell about 20% of Wranglers in Colorado with a stick and there are still a lot of Subarus with manuals here. It isn't that hard to find a manual car, if the model was ever offered with one. Resale on MT vehicles is actually higher than for an automatic for most cars.
 
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Yeah...uh no.....I refuse to let clutch shifted transmissions die!

For you kids, this si how it's done''Old Skool!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y86joSmEDNs
 

Grant 302

basic and well known psychic
Once the balance of fuel efficiency tipped in favor of the automatic, the days of the manual trans was numbered. The manual trans used to help meet CAFE standards, and that's no longer the case. They're only around to satisfy the demand from our shrinking enthusiast base.
 
blacksheep-1 said:
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Yeah...uh no.....I refuse to let clutch shifted transmissions die!

For you kids, this si how it's done''Old Skool!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y86joSmEDNs
Now I need to search eBay for a set of those wing-tipped driving shoes! 8) 8) 8)
 
Forget whether we'll have manuals, will we even have cars?? This is amazing to see the precipitous drop in the percentage of younger people getting driver's licenses.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/these-numbers-terrify-gm--ford-and-the-other-automakers-160157091.html#
 
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cloud9 said:
Forget whether we'll have manuals, will we even have cars?? This is amazing to see the precipitous drop in the percentage of younger people getting driver's licenses.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/these-numbers-terrify-gm--ford-and-the-other-automakers-160157091.html#

True stories: My daughter is 22 and a graduate student. When she graduated from high school in 2011, at least half of her co-graduates didn't have driver's licenses, but we chalked it up to the cost of getting a license in CO (Under 18, you have to take private driver's ed classes and they can be expensive.) She went off to college and last year she came home for spring break with two friends from school to do a Four Corners loop through CO, UT, AZ and NM. Cool, I thought, they can share the driving. But wait, one of the kids (age 21) didn't have a license, and the other hadn't driven in three years! My daughter ended up driving the entire way. Now this year, as a grad student, she took off to ski over Christmas break with two other students. They went to a place five hours each way from school. Again, she ended up driving, because the 22-24 year olds DIDN'T HAVE DRIVER'S LICENSES. Holy crap. You must be kidding. One of the repercussions of this has already taken hold in the Denver area. Kids under 30 want to live right next to public transportation because they don't want anything to do with cars. At that age I couldn't wait to be able to buy a house with a garage for my cars. I wonder how this will play out as these kids have kids themselves. It is miserable trying to raise kids with public transportation, my brother tried in Chicago for a few years and finally gave in and bought not one, but two cars at the same time.

On the manual trans situation, the daughter took her car to grad school with her and it is the only automatic we had other than our plow truck. She had steadfastly refused to learn to drive a stick while she was still at home. She flew home for Christmas this year and guess what? No automatics to drive. We ran her through a crash course, and she had no problem adapting to shifting, but she said she will never personally own a manual. Cars are just a utility to her, and whatever lessens the pain is what she wants. On the other hand, my son has been driving a manual from the start, and loves his manual sports cars.
 

TMSBOSS

Spending my pension on car parts and track fees.
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coboss said:
True stories: My daughter is 22 and a graduate student. When she graduated from high school in 2011, at least half of her co-graduates didn't have driver's licenses, but we chalked it up to the cost of getting a license in CO (Under 18, you have to take private driver's ed classes and they can be expensive.) She went off to college and last year she came home for spring break with two friends from school to do a Four Corners loop through CO, UT, AZ and NM. Cool, I thought, they can share the driving. But wait, one of the kids (age 21) didn't have a license, and the other hadn't driven in three years! My daughter ended up driving the entire way. Now this year, as a grad student, she took off to ski over Christmas break with two other students. They went to a place five hours each way from school. Again, she ended up driving, because the 22-24 year olds DIDN'T HAVE DRIVER'S LICENSES. Holy crap. You must be kidding. One of the repercussions of this has already taken hold in the Denver area. Kids under 30 want to live right next to public transportation because they don't want anything to do with cars. At that age I couldn't wait to be able to buy a house with a garage for my cars. I wonder how this will play out as these kids have kids themselves. It is miserable trying to raise kids with public transportation, my brother tried in Chicago for a few years and finally gave in and bought not one, but two cars at the same time.

On the manual trans situation, the daughter took her car to grad school with her and it is the only automatic we had other than our plow truck. She had steadfastly refused to learn to drive a stick while she was still at home. She flew home for Christmas this year and guess what? No automatics to drive. We ran her through a crash course, and she had no problem adapting to shifting, but she said she will never personally own a manual. Cars are just a utility to her, and whatever lessens the pain is what she wants. On the other hand, my son has been driving a manual from the start, and loves his manual sports cars.

City folks??? I know of no kids over the age of 16 without a license.
 
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TMSBOSS said:
City folks??? I know of no kids over the age of 16 without a license.

No, not city folks. Colorado, Vermont, Michigan...these are exactly the kids you would expect to want to get their licenses at 16, but they just don't.

When asked, they say they would rather ride public transportation/bum rides than deal with car ownership, insurance, maintenance, etc. To be fair, when I turned 16 I bought a car for $150 and my insurance was $300 a year. I was making $3.00/hr at the time (actually slightly more than minimum wage), so it took 50 hours to buy the car and 100 hours to pay for insurance. I could maintain the car by myself, and I could get good used tires for $5.00, oil was 50 cents a quart. At today's $8.00/hr, you'd have to be able to find a car for $400 and insurance for $800/yr to be equivalent. I haven't seen a tire you could drive on for $13.00 in a long time, or oil that is $1.45. Plates when I was a kid were $15, $5.00 to transfer a title, and you didn't have to pay sales tax on a used car purchase. In CO, the minimum plate cost is $75 and goes up over $1000 for a new car, and you pay 8% sales tax on a used car plus title transfer, etc. etc. Tickets? A moving violation was a $20 fine, no court costs. A ticket now is $200 minimum here. Driving is simply more expensive, minimum wage jobs are much harder to get, and you are paid way less after inflation and taxes than we were in the 70's. Add to that the fact that in the 70's we didn't have to spend money on phones, computers and the like. I guess a teenager could get by without a phone, but computers are mandatory now, and a phone might as well be. I'm 55, and I am really glad I grew up in the 70's when I could get five job offers making minimum wage in fifteen minutes of door knocking, then I could easily buy and maintain a car on that part time minimum wage. I had money left over for the "Change back from your dollar" meal at McDonalds and I actually bought beer for .99 a six pack. A kid simply can't own a car today working 15 hours a week at minimum wage like I could.
 

TMSBOSS

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Not too argue and this is my last post on the subject....but. Public transportation is an urban thing. We live 5 miles from a town with 300 people. A kid has no drivers license and he/she is going nowhere figuratively and literally. A license is essential and had by all.
Yea, it costs money to drive and even more to pay a ticket. I have a niece living in NY city and she has been without a car since shortly after they moved there. Too expensive for them. But that's NY city.
The desire to drive has been a major motivator for kids to get a job. Make a few bucks and buy a beater and enjoy their freedom. In the middle of corn field USA there is no other way to get around.
 
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Well they destroyed Pro Stock when they allowed Lenco transmissions into it, until then you actually needed talent to drive a drag car, now it might as be remote control. But there's nothing like the sound of a 4 speed car going through the gears on the quarter mile...except they are now mostly 1/8 miles these days.
I can tell you the instant I became a car guy, my parents always had a Christmas eve party and a friend came over in his 57 Chevy, we went for a ride and he hung that power shift and I was hooked...right then.
 
Not quite where I thought this thread would go but what the heck.

My twins just turned 14 and will learn to drive in 18 months. Both are looking forward to it but more so my son. I've been taking both of them to kart tracks since they were eight. My plan is to buy them a Focus with a manual and teach them how to drive it. My hope is shifting will not leave them time to text and drive at the same time.
 
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TMSBOSS said:
Not too argue and this is my last post on the subject....but. Public transportation is an urban thing. We live 5 miles from a town with 300 people. A kid has no drivers license and he/she is going nowhere figuratively and literally. A license is essential and had by all.
Yea, it costs money to drive and even more to pay a ticket. I have a niece living in NY city and she has been without a car since shortly after they moved there. Too expensive for them. But that's NY city.
The desire to drive has been a major motivator for kids to get a job. Make a few bucks and buy a beater and enjoy their freedom. In the middle of corn field USA there is no other way to get around.



I agree if you live in the middle of nowhere a car is desirable, but in fact, I live 13 miles from the nearest grocery store and 7 miles from the nearest public transportation and the kids where I live *still* don't get their licenses when they turn 16. They ride the school bus and bum rides from parents/friends/neighbors, etc. It is weird. They have no burning desire to drive like we did. To them, driving is a chore better left to someone else.
 
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cloud9 said:
Forget whether we'll have manuals, will we even have cars?? This is amazing to see the precipitous drop in the percentage of younger people getting driver's licenses.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/these-numbers-terrify-gm--ford-and-the-other-automakers-160157091.html#

I'll throw out a couple other things about kids not wanting to drive, since I have seen this phenomenon in Colorado for about a decade. The death of manuals is just a symptom of the larger issue.

The article had an interesting statement that I had never considered:

"Many millennials lack the cash for such a big purchase anyway, since the job market for twentysomethings is still soft and the average student-debt burden is near a record high. And many millennials who do drive prefer leasing over buying, since there’s no down payment and you can upgrade your ride more often."

Knowing a lot of Millennials, both friends of my kids, and at work, the statement about them being broke is spot on. They have been trained that taking a $20-50-100K loan to get through school is just normal, and they don't think about the later consequences. Those consequences are that they end up in their parent's basements or sharing an apartment with five other people. They are just trying to put food on the table and pay off their loans, buying a car is a remote fantasy, even if they want one. They have also been trained by their phone contracts that leasing is the same as owning and you must have the latest tech. They don't want to buy a car and pay on it for five or six years, and then own it. I have always thought leasing was the dumbest thing you could possibly do, but now that the cost of entry into a car is so high, credit is so hard to get, and people don't drive as much as they used to, I can see why a 20 something might opt to lease. It might be their only option. Their credit is often too poor to finance a car loan, they don't know how to keep a beater running ,and since they often live in some crappy urban environment anyway, there is nowhere to work on a car. And they want to upgrade every few years anyway.

As pointed out in the article, the fact that young people are flocking to cities is another huge factor at play.

I'll throw out another factor - the influx of foreign born residents. It is *very* unusual for someone from China or India or South America or Russia to have owned a car where they came from. They are not all that interested in learning to drive here if they have some other way to get around. I work with a lot of Chinese and Indian people, and many of them carpool five to a car to get to/from work, since very few have a car or a driver's license. They all hate the fact that our office is in suburbia with mediocre public transport, and in fact, we have lost a lot of potential new hires over our location, not just foreign born candidates, but US born ones, also. They will take less money to work downtown since they don't have to own a car. In my experience this is a 180 degree change from 30 years ago, when you couldn't get people to work downtown in a large city unless you paid them more, and everyone wanted to be in the suburbs.

If you live in a rural area far from a city, you may not be seeing these trends, but there is a shift taking place in how people in the US view our transportation options. Essentially we are returning to the way it was 75 years ago - my parent's transportation options in their 20's were walk or ride the trolley/train/bus. They didn't get their first car until they were in their late 20's because they couldn't afford one. Most people alive today lived through the glory age of the car where owning one was cheap, and there weren't any real options anyway. That has changed. It is expensive to own a car, and cities are expanding their transit, even relatively small cities. The automakers are scared, and rightfully so.
 
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"Knowing a lot of Millennials, both friends of my kids, and at work, the statement about them being broke is spot on. They have been trained that taking a $20-50-100K loan to get through school is just normal, and they don't think about the later consequences. Those consequences are that they end up in their parent's basements or sharing an apartment with five other people. They are just trying to put food on the table and pay off their loans, buying a car is a remote fantasy, even if they want one. They have also been trained by their phone contracts that leasing is the same as owning and you must have the latest tech. They don't want to buy a car and pay on it for five or six years, and then own it. I have always thought leasing was the dumbest thing you could possibly do, but now that the cost of entry into a car is so high, credit is so hard to get, and people don't drive as much as they used to, I can see why a 20 something might opt to lease. It might be their only option. Their credit is often too poor to finance a car loan, they don't know how to keep a beater running ,and since they often live in some crappy urban environment anyway, there is nowhere to work on a car. And they want to upgrade every few years anyway."

Hence a particular candidates popularity, but it doesn't have to be this way, I got out of high school, went to trade school and started making money right away. The skills to run machines, build things, create stuff is where the US needs to be. When I was teaching fire academy we had 20 somethings that had 4 year degrees and couldn't thread hose couplings together....rightsy tightsy..lefty loosey....geez
 
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Ok, who doesn't love a Monica Lewinsky cigar smoking,open face helmet, lap belt wearing ,gear banging american racer? I LOVED that video!
The millennials that i work with will/do PANIC if there cell phone battery is less than 10%. Think they all believe there heart might stop if that thing goes dead or they don't have there cellphone on them at all times. That being said, i love each and every one of them. They keep me young and crack me up. Netflix and chill.... I thought that just a sweet night of TV watching with a good craft beer. Little did i know....LOL
coboss nailed this one. Its just different times . glad to grow up in the 80's here in AZ.
 

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