Can you drive a car with a Manual Transmission?

I currently drive an automatic with Manual Mode. But being raised on the farm I had no choice but to learn how to drive a manual transmission... plus there's that small fact that I used to drive 18-wheelers. (Although maneuvering the transmission on an 18 wheeler is nothing like a regular car...)

I also have a little fun with manual transmissions though... I even have a little fun with my car in manual mode, nice to rev up the torque, and achieve some "get up and go."

~*Ash*~

 

Auto for me. Being from a very dense urban area with stop signs every 15 feet and traffic that makes it take 15 minutes to go 1 mile, having to shift that constantly would suck.

 

I learnt to drive on a stick shift and only drove sticks for a while, however somewhere along the line I went to automatics and now I drive my automatic in the manual mode.

 

All of my 4 wheeled vehicles are automatics, the Harley has a 6 speed manual though. Automatic motorcycles are quite rare.

 

Drive a 6-speed manual, but can also drive an automatic when necessary.

 

Always driven Automatics. Presently have a car with Manu-matic mode, though. Hardly ever use it.

 

My old car had that manu-matic mode, or as top gear UK calls it, "flappy-paddle gear box." In that mode, the automatic transmission lets you control when it shifts. One time my friend accidentally hit the shifter without me knowing and the transmission stuck in 3rd gear for MUCH longer than it should have.

 

That's how it appears to be.

Both of mine work the same way, in the manual mode I can upshift when I want to (there maybe some threshold limitation that I have not hit yet), but on the downshift it takes over when I start to slow down below 35mph. I have gotten into the habit of upshifting manually and letting the car do the down shifting, in city driving.

I am not sure about the engineering behind the scenes; sorry not a ME.

 

My roommate has a car with the manu-matic, and I tried shifting manually. It was not a gratifying experience I especially found the automatic downshifting annoying. I'd say its best for controlling traction in snow & ice, but without a clutch its not fun (at least for me it wasn't)

 

Agreed, does not compare with driving with a clutch and the auto downshift is definitely annoying.

Still better than a full automatic imho.

 

I think its just a gimmick to sell cars. It sounds real cool when the salesman tells you about it, and its kinda fun for the first day or so, but the novelty wears off very quickly.

 

Hasn't for me, I still drive my 2001 Acura CLS upshifting manually after 123,000+ miles.

 

In my car, it automatically shifts from 1st to 2nd. After that, it's up to me to shift up (up to 5th gear) before the RPM's get too high (I always shift arount 3,000 RPM).

 

I think my Manu-Matic is a little bit more fine tuned than some of the others... (But I drive a 2011 vehicle) I find it comes in really handy when I need some extra speed, to be able to shift down, and grab a bit of torque.

But my car will NOT allow you to go over the safe RPM limit, even if Manual mode it'll shift itself if you don't do it first.

 

I have been driving stick since 1976 when I learned on a 1976 Datsun 510 Wagon. With the exception of a few cars that I owned that were automatics. I don't like auto transmissions, and my current girly mobile is a manual.

 

The newer cars including my girly mobile do not let you over rev when shifting.

 

My car and my wife's are both manuals. After my wife learned to drive a stick, that's all she wanted. I love shifting, but traffic does suck.

I have a Tundra too, and it wasn't available with a manual. It's the plain jane automatic where you only get to select the highest available gear and it shifts wherever it wants.

My wife wants an Acadia, which is also an automatic, but it has the manual mode. We test drove one a while back and as I recall, it was full manual and let me rev all the way to redline without automatically shifting.

My wish is that someone would make a manual transmission with an extra C (creep) gear that would use a small fluid coupled torque converter so you could put it in gear even when stopped. It would be great for bumper to bumper traffic and stop and go traffic under say 20 mph. You could even use it for hill starts.

For every other gear give me my direct drive though!

 

That's about the only time when I feel bothered with my manual -- stop and go up the hills in San Francisco. The hills are steep enough to make the car slip even with the fully engaged hand brake (OK, need 2-3 passengers, but that's usually how many I have when I go there), and having to stop-and-go 3-4 times between stop signs is not a pleasant experience.

 

Probably 90% of the cars in Europe are stick-shift, so you don't have much of a choice here. But I'm still a lazy American at heart, and will prefer an automatic to a stick given a choice ...well, unless it's a '87 IROC-Z 5L/305, then I'll take a stick

 

I can't either -- fortunately enough, I already knew how when I got there

 

I currently drive a manual and I don't know if i will ever go back to automatic. But I guess that depends on what kind of car I get next.

 

I would like to see a manual trans taught in drivers ed. Not all vehicles have an auto trans. right now my fleet stands at 4 autos, and 3 manuals. But I do have an auto to manual conversion brewing on one of them. Already have all the parts.

 

When I took drivers ed in the late 80's there were 2 kinds of vehicles that we trained on. Mazda pickup trucks with 5 speed manual transmissions, and Ford LTD Crown Victoria police cars retired from our local Sheriff's Department that had 4 speed automatics.